The article, “To Hell with Good Intentions” first made its way into my hands in 2013 on a chilly fall day in Sweden. I was a participant at The International Youth Initiative Program (YIP), an altruistic social entrepreneurship training for youth. That afternoon we were in the portion of our week aptly titled, “Internship Preparation.” As part of the curriculum we were to embark on a 6 - week internship to diverse countries around the world. The goal being for us participants to learn from established organizations that were working with local challenges. I remember part of the original allure of YIP was the idea of this internship. From the palpable excitement in the room, I could see that others felt similarly. 
 
Before I continue on, I want to give a little context to who I was as a 22- year - old. Prior to arriving in Sweden I had begun to work with questions around where I had come from, who I was now and who I wanted to become. My deep thirst to understand myself in context to the world had been present ever since I could remember, but I was finally emotionally mature enough to express this curiosity. Even though Occupy Wall Street had taken place far away from my island home of Maui, it had sparked something profound in me, something which until recently had been intangible. I hadn’t grown up in a politically active household and had yet to be politicized, so the Occupy Movement had raised more questions rather than statements as I struggled to gain a footing in the relevancy of this historical moment. Right at this time when I was asking where to go and what to do with my life YIP had come into view. Here was a place I could learn about the world and myself. A place that would accept my half notions of “making a difference” based solely on the fact that I cared. The internship seemed just the thing that might give me an experience capable of putting this feeling of “caring” into action.
 
It was more than unsettling for me when the organizers of our program handed out a transcribed speech titled “To Hell with Good Intentions”. The speech was given in 1968 to a group of American college students. The author Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher, well known for his critical views on contemporary western culture outlined why he is against “Mission-vacations” and “North American do-gooders.” In 6 pages of strong yet concise language, I was forced to wrestle with ideas of progress and my identity that regardless of my brown skin spoke of privilege concerning the “American Way of Life.” Illich’s viewpoint was that one of the “largest exports” of the U.S. is the “idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders.” His appeal is not earnest but instead straight forward and at times haunting. He ends his speech by plainly saying, “I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status, and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.” I underlined that last sentence made aware that I was being called on to have a confronting conversation with myself around values, ideas of identity and most importantly intention. I was also scared. I was having a clear and painful awakening around the popular notion that just because I had time and interest did not necessarily mean I had something to offer.
 
That was five years ago. Since then there have been opportunities to explore those original questions that this speech asked of me. I have continued to travel, created relationships in new places, worked on projects in different countries and always kept the original copy of this speech tucked away with my important paperwork. I have re-visited it over the years as a personal north star, discussed it with new and old friends and worked at deciphering the many points it touched on. In short, Illich was asking for the halt of travel and experiences made extractive based off of the notion of helping and improving, to stop thinking that we know what it means to live a truly wealthy life. Within the mindset of the well-intentioned savior lives similar constructs of colonization. These are hard truths that are stark contrasts to the idea of what we have been told and shown when we ask what it means to give back, especially when we ask who is really reaping the benefits of our “helping hands.” 
 
I often see remnants of the sentiments of this speech in online posts and long comment threads concerning our fragmented conversations on racial and social justice. A post might start out with “You well-intentioned _____”. These statements cut right to the heart of Illich’s viewpoint, which at times feels paralyzing. In this paralysis I am left with the question, “Is it possible to do no harm in our quest to do good?” In a world where we are being asked to show up every day for our communities, policies, and earth we must also remain diligent in how we show up, asking how the consequences of our actions may ripple out and shift others realities besides our own. Every intention is made personal through the nuance that makes up our lives, but learning to ground our intentions in research, questions and an attitude based on the practice of humility and listening might be our only way forward. 
 
Questions that help to hold me accountable: 

• Why am I embarking on this project? 
• What is my role in this work? 
• How do I build and hold trust?
• Who do I need to be listening too?
• Do I need to be witnessed in this work? 
• What would it mean for me to practice quietness?
• Who can help me remain accountable throughout this journey? 

None of this is lost upon either of us. Morgan, like so many of my friends today, is in a state of reconciliation with her ancestry. Unlike most, she has clear documentation of the entirety of her family’s history from the first moment Minister Adam Blakeman set foot upon the shores of Stratford. In an odd way, this is something that we have in common. I too share in the great privilege of known lineage and origin. I too have visited where my ancestors now rest, except that my ancestors and family have lived here in North America for the past 8,000 years. My family, First Nations peoples, were the ones that ancestors like Adam Blakeman ended up colonizing. In today’s world, it would be easy to label Morgan as white and me as a person of color. We are both familiar with these labels, the subtlety that accompanies each, and the way that society plays into these labels. This afternoon though, like any day we spend together, we are stretching these labels. Most importantly, Morgan and I are friends, and a part of our dedication to our friendship is why we are in this graveyard.
Adam Blakeman was born in Gnosall, Staffordshire, England, June 10, 1596, and traveled by boat to Connecticut in 1638. He fled England in order to found a Utopian community where he would be free to practice his Puritan faith. This is a well-known story that is the foundation of American history. Often times though, as the story has been told and re-told through the generations, the truth and perspective of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are left out. In the justification of fleeing persecution, an idea of a right to dominion over land and people has been written into our history books as absolute. Adam Blakeman and other men like him held no interest in stopping the circle of oppression that they themselves had experienced in their homeland. I am sure that the idea of an actual friendship between those first Puritan’s and the Native Peoples whose homes and lives were taken was inconceivable. As inconceivable as the idea of one of the “Daughters of the Revolution” sitting at his grave with her native friend.
Someone has placed a miniature American flag to the right of Minister Blakeman’s headstone, a clear marker among the many graves. The flag seemed to say, “Here commemorates an original American.” Morgan and I are quieted by the sight of the stone. It is wide and larger than most of the others. I think about how much this man could not have imagined in the year 1665, the year when he died. He could not have imagined how big this town would become, or that there would be a road so close to his church filled with noise and exhaust. Together, sitting on the ground Morgan and I give our prayers to this ancestor and to the Paugussett Peoples, who’s nation existed before the settlement of Stratford. We talk about our friendship, how we are finding our way forward together after hundreds of years of pain. Morgan places a flicker feather, a small offering at the base of the headstone. I take her photo and she looks up into my lens with a serious expression that also seems to border on confusion.
We make our way out of the graveyard and back into the car where we drive for 10 minutes before parking at the water’s edge. We get out and gaze into the blue horizon. Somewhere close to where we are standing now is the exact spot that Adam Blakeman first sighted from the bow of his ship in 1638. It is the place that he would decide to settle and begin a new life. It’s a windy day and we stand there, hair blowing, at the site of where Morgan’s family first began to consider themselves American. Here is where one particular myth of progress began, a story so strong in its conviction, that over 300 years later, we still name it as our becoming. We know better, and before we go, Morgan and I take a photo together.
My friends and I talk often about “collective liberation”. At the core of all of these conversations is the desire to experience in our own lifetimes the dismantling of systems of oppression, understanding that in such systems no one is exempt from suffering. To me, working towards collective liberation means exercising an ever-expanding capacity to hold nuance. In conversation, today on both the right and the left, many ideas are oversimplified to black and white, or right and wrong. While we cannot deny the reality that our economic and social systems here in the United States are founded upon white supremacy, we also cannot deny that each of us and our histories are complex and layered. It is possible, especially in North America to hold within one’s own lineage the oppressor and the oppressed. But what exactly does it mean to “hold nuance”? Recently, Brendan Campbell, a Two-Spirit of nēhiyaw (Cree) descent, posted on Facebook such a clear definition of this term and what is being asked of us, that I have not been able to get his words out of my head. Brendan writes, ““Holding nuance,” as has been taught to me, is the balancing of sometimes completely different views that sometimes come in conflict with each other. It’s intellectually challenging, and when rooted in an anti-oppressive/justice-seeking approach, it’s emotionally grueling. For me, I try to hold nuance when looking at my family and my communities. I hold nuance when I recognize that although members of my family hold harmful xenophobic and Islamophobic views, these same family members are navigating legacies of settler-colonialism that disconnected them from their homelands, language, culture, and traditional livelihood while also subjecting them to a lot of hardship. Now with that being said, I don’t claim that nuance means we don’t address harm. I think nuance means the opposite. It means recognizing a person’s complexity while also helping them work on learning and restorative justice (opposed to writing them off or cutting them out of our lives)…Perhaps the take-home is this: in our families and in our communities, we need to honour each other’s complexities, especially when they are informed by legacies of violence, trauma, and resistance.” I would also add that by recognizing how our struggles and histories are intertwined, we have the power to dismantle on a personal level the boundaries that have been and continue to be created. The friendship that Morgan and I hold has always felt sacred to me. The unlikely event of it has allowed both of us, I believe to taste the sweetness of what might be called, our own liberation. A possibility brought forward by the chains of both our ancestry.
I am compelled to write about and share this story now, because of the ever-divisive culture that we are being coerced into participating in. Last week an individual, who does not really know me, wrote me an awful message on Facebook after a combative conversation in a comment section on one of my posts. I had re-posted an article titled, “The Midterms Are Our Chance To Vote Out White Supremacy”. At the top of the post I had pulled a quote from the article that read, “On this year’s ballot, there are a historic number of black women and progressive candidates ready to fight for their communities. If we don’t show up and show out at the polls, with a fierce dedication to voting out white supremacy, there is much to lose.” Above this quote, I had written the words, “Hello midterms. Let’s vote the WOC in Please!!!!” This person was angered by the fact that I was encouraging people to vote for women of color. From this statement, they created a whole story about me. Unable to hold nuance they assumed I only voted based off of gender and race. What they were unable to understand was how exciting it is for a woman of color to have the opportunity to vote in individuals who represent not only my politics but also how I look. In a private message after comparing me to a Nazi who is, “contributing to the rapid disintegration of this great country”, they informed me they would be “terminating our Facebook friendship”, and then ended the message by writing, “you seem like a very lonely person who finds power only in blaming and inciting hatred to those who are not like you.” The greatest irony was that this person’s supposed position was based in a desire to find a way forward together and that what prompted this message was that I refused to have an argument in a comments section online, not to be confused with having a conversation. By deleting me on Facebook, they ended the possibility for a real dialogue, instead inciting the trap of “us against them”. This drawing of a “hard line” is something that I see done every day online, and it worries me. To draw a line is easy, but fighting for our collective liberation was never going to be easy. I realized upon receiving this message that our ability to hold nuance and to walk into what will likely be uncomfortable territory is to be vulnerable and that for many this might look or feel like defeat. To be challenged and uncomfortable is not the same thing as losing, and winning a debate should never be the point of starting a conversation. To begin from the standpoint of having to be right is to lose the real opportunity of dialogue, which is to hear another’s truth and maybe even expand one’s perspective.
As we ready ourselves for Thanksgiving, I know that many of us are holding questions around what it means to be an American today. Especially as some of us prepare to sit around a table with family members and friends who have different perspectives around this question, and what this day represents. Through the desire to build a wall our current government role models acts of division. The Trump Administration believes that drawing a line is a necessary act for our own survival, standing by the argument that we do not have enough to share and that there will never be enough space for us all at the table. By lived experience, I feel and know differently. To not be in dialogue is to succumb to the greatest lie of all, the myth that we have time to be at odds. Our planet and societies need us to choose a discourse that will breathe life into something new, our collective liberation. As the chorus to one of my favorite songs articulates so clearly, “It is time now. It is time now that we thrive.”

My plane touches down onto the tarmac of the San Francisco Airport and I flip off the airplane mode on my phone, waiting for my signal to catch. A barrage of texts and news announcements stream onto my screen: “Are you and Adam safe? Have you had to evacuate?” they read. Evacuate what? I worry before opening one of the news stories entitled “The Tubbs Fire.” I rapidly scroll through the article, aware that the rest of the plane has awoken to this same news and that many of us are now holding our breath as we go through the motions of deplaning and worming our way through customs. I send a series of rapid messages to Adam as I shuffle my way forward in line. “What’s going on?!” I text, “Is the house okay?” “Yes, everything is okay,” he replies, “let’s talk in the car.” I take my first deep breath and my hands move instinctively to my stomach, where they rest for the remainder of my time in line.
 
The Tubbs Fire was one of over a dozen Northern California wildfires that devastated communities in October of 2017. It became national news overnight, as it was specifically this fire that ended up burning over 5,000 structures and killing at least 22 people. Residents were forced to flee their homes in the middle of the night as whole neighborhoods in the city of Santa Rosa burned to the ground. My partner Adam and I live just a half hour south of Santa Rosa, in the town of Petaluma. This “firestorm,” as it has since been called, has inked itself into my memory, not only because of its gravity and proximity, but also because it marked the start of my pregnancy.
 
48 hours before the Tubbs fire ignited I gazed down at a positive pregnancy test in London. It was the tale end of a two-and-a-half-week trip to Europe, where I had been facilitating my course, “Earth Is `Ohana,” a class on embracing spiritual ecology as a response to our climate crisis. The day before I took this pregnancy test I was sharing about the “3-6-9 concept,” which references that our planet is headed toward a 3-degree Celsius global temperature increase, while going through the 6th mass extinction of species, and simultaneously headed towards a global population of 9 billion people by 2050. I had asked the class to sit in silence and reflect on how the sum of these numbers impacts them. For the majority of my 20’s my identity has largely been wrapped up in youth and climate work, understanding and sharing information like this has been the focus of my life for the past few years. The enormity of discovering that I was pregnant was also intertwined in the reality of these numbers. I was excited, yet critically aware of what it meant to bring another human being onto this planet. As I waited outside of the airport for Adam I kept thinking about how the myth of “safer, higher ground” was rapidly fading for many, and that our child would be living through so much more of this climate chaos.
 
The following days and weeks were surreal. Adam and I planned our future while packing up all the important items in our home. While we watched the ever expanding plume of black smoke to the north of us blanket the sky, family photos came down off the walls and were taken south for safekeeping, to his brother’s house. Checking the direction of the wind before bed became ritual, while we prayed that the fire wouldn’t jump the freeway in the middle of the night. We drove into the hot red haze that was Santa Rosa for my first prenatal appointment and listened to our baby’s heartbeat before being handed smoke masks and being warned that pregnant women needed to stay indoors during this time. As we drove home through the smoke I wondered about who this baby would be, but I was especially curious about why my child was choosing to come now. The sorrow of lost homes and lost lives poured into our small town, leaving evacuated families with nowhere to go except the front of our supermarkets. Store shelves were emptied and sirens raced continuously up and down the freeway while I tried my best to convince my close family and friends that Adam and I were safe, all the while delivering the news that we were starting a family.
 
“How do you feel?” was often the first question posed in these conversations. “Excited!” I would respond, eyeing the thick haze of smoke outside my window. Mostly I felt sad as I kept mentally replaying a recent visit with one of Adam’s friends. Over breakfast she had shared about her close encounters with the fire. A single mother living in Santa Rosa, she had awoken to the overpowering smell of smoke and, looking outside her window, saw flames rapidly making their way towards her home. Waking her daughter, she ran with her to their car and fled. It was only once they were at a safe distance that she turned to her child and asked if she was okay, to which her daughter replied, “my heart is shaking.”
 
These words echoed in my head as I remembered how our friend’s eyes filled with tears as she shared this story. This was the first moment I felt the strong surge of maternal instinct race through my body, the feeling of a love so all-consuming that it hurts to the marrow of your bones. In that moment I learned that it is possible to hear and feel the crying of the earth in a new way, that the feeling of your child’s heart shaking makes your own quake. I felt like an animal within my expanding flesh, rubbed raw by the truth that my skin was stretching to house another’s, and that one day this life would have to navigate our world.
 
As I grow bigger through the months I learn that pregnancy is a time of feeling vulnerable and powerful. I become aware of how my womb is an entire ocean, my body a whole earth unto itself, my baby it’s only citizen. My belly leaves nothing to hide, announcing that I have chosen to always place another’s life before mine, a life I live to protect. At times I have thought of pregnancy as both a consensual and non-consensual experience; consensual in that I have chosen to say yes to this journey, yes to growing this life, but I have not agreed to my gums bleeding and my teeth weakening because the baby needs my calcium. My body constantly feeds this life as my organs rearrange themselves without consulting my rational mind. Growing a child is teaching me that my capacity to give is rooted at a cellular level. I wonder if it’s possible to learn this without carrying a child, and I’m hit by the reality that everything I am going through is one of life’s most natural processes. I am curious how many of my peers will one day join me in parenthood. For most of us it seems inevitable; after all we are all animals.
 
“How will you balance motherhood and activism?” a friend asks me at the end of a conference. I appreciate her directness; it’s the silent question that I can hear wrapped around the many congratulations that I receive from my peers who know me exclusively through projects related to climate and social justice. I know my pregnancy is a surprising and even shocking turn of events for my current social group, most of whom actively work within “the youth sector.” I am the first of us to become pregnant and I can tell that, by association, I am aging my friends. Suddenly the words “the next generation” has taken on a new and much more intimate meaning. The next generation is no longer us; the next generation is growing in my womb. Recently a friend with whom I attended the UN Climate Conferences reposted a New York Times article on Facebook entitled, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It.” At first read I feel confronted by the wave of guilt that washes over me. Through the years I’ve lamented over the many points the article outlines. For me it all comes down to two questions: is it a selfish and destructive act to have a child? and if I do, will my child be okay in an uncertain future? Choosing to have a baby while being so intricately aware of the many ways the world is burning seems crazy. What does it mean to mother a whole generation of children into the devastation of these times? I’m scared because I don’t know. All that I do know is that suddenly my personal timeline has been yanked forward, beyond my own life and into the future of my child’s, providing a new type of urgency to understand where and how I might be most effective. Growing this life helps me to remember that my original introduction to grassroots activism was through mothers. These were women from my home on Maui who taught me the importance of showing up in my own community. From the mother who took her newborn door-to-door to collect signatures, to the single mothers who are currently running for office, back at home our activist spaces seamlessly blend family life and parenthood. These mothers continue to persevere because, as I’m learning, having a child demands a new type of engagement. I feel responsible for creating a healthier world for my baby to grow into, as well as shaping a human being that will play their part in our larger collective healing. I believe that activism and parenthood have always informed each other, but the act of mothering can often be invisible work. As we have started to acknowledge on a societal level, we can never know the true price of a mother or a father’s contribution, but for those who have yet to parent, we still can’t help but attempt to measure and question its value.
 
I feel every inch of my son’s head pass through me before I see his body gently land beneath my crouching open legs. He is silent until the midwife quickly picks him up to give him a little kiss of air that sets off a loud and continuous wail. His umbilical cord that binds his body and mine is the last remaining connection to our intimate truth of shared flesh. Just like every ancestor that has ever graced this planet, our love originates from an understanding that we were once one. I realize that my idea of what it meant to be a mother was simply theory before this moment. Until he was here I could not know that to birth another human being is to cross a threshold wherein ideas of right and wrong no longer exist. Here on the other side is the reminder that we were once all pure; within each of our origin stories was our own will to let life continue through us. When my son is placed on my chest for the first time, I am relieved of any shame for his life. I realize that dwelling in my previous guilt only takes away from the possibility of what my son’s life might offer. He is proof that within each of us lies the powerful act of creation.
 
I am a parent now. This new identity has slowly permeated every crevice of my being. It wills me to wake in the middle of the night to feed, to soothe, to hold. I do all these things with a gentleness and patience I did not know I possessed. I have long held the natural world in reverence, but to hold a part of me in this new truth is the closest thing I have known to holiness. For the first time as an adult I feel unapologetically grateful to be a part of my species. To become reacquainted with my humanness is a cooling respite after years of repenting for all that we have done. I had forgotten that we arrive inherently good and, in this amnesia, I had lost sight of our greater potential. In a world dominated by the story of our ugliness I have found it to easy to point a finger, to create boundaries and to have polarizing opinions about the “right ways to live.” Holding my child, I am suddenly able to shed many of these perceptions; instead I am contemplating how I might live from my own inherent goodness so that I may love my work as I do my child. After all, if those of us who care fail to seed the next generations, who will continue this work when we are gone?

"With regards to the rise of NeoMcCarthyism on the left: 
​
To those empowered by recently acquired knowledge of the pervasive corruption, cronyism, and treachery inherent to imperialism, colonialism, racism, manifest destiny, patriarchy, sexism, capitalism, etc. I commend you. Welcome to the movement.

However, the swift reprisal of anyone who may not parrot the popular opinion of the week is a counterproductive measure. Disagreement is healthy. Infighting is not. 
Those activists who may have moved through much of the rage-stage do not necessarily become any less wrathful, nor have they ceased sharpening their spears. 
Activism takes place on a wide spectrum, upon which an individual may shift throughout life. To expect all allies to share the same opinions & strategies at all times is groupthink. It is also Totalitarian. 
In previous years, alternative news was coveted due to its rarity, yet today we are incessantly bombarded with ceaseless data. Due to the age-old marketing strategy of breeding mass outrage in order to garner more views/support/attention/affirmation, many seasoned activists have taken to resisting the distraction-factory by observing longer periods of relative silence. Such silence should not be confused with apathy. Rather, it is strategic.

Outrage fatigue is real and our movement is in the thick of it.

A movement currently hijacked by hatred. Yet fighting hatred with hatred is a zero-sum game. To be clear: anger and hatred are not one in the same. 
Anger can be a tool. 
Hatred is cumbersome. 
Self-defense is a powerful force.
Revenge seeking is blinding. 
Our movement has lost this nuance.
Our movement is rewarding groupthink.
Our movement is losing compassion. 
Our movement has lost sight of the long-game. Where short term "wins" and stirring up the next great controversy are becoming as addictive as fb likes. 
It is a truism that the ends don't justify the means. We must do our best to embody now that which we strive to become in the future. Collectively and personally. 
It brings me great concern, because if we lose sight of peace in our attempts to create a more peaceful world, what will remain that is worth fighting for?" - Summer Starr

I've been in an ever expanding conversation with  Marissa Correia of ma.medicina and she recorded a portion of it for her Practical Priestess Podcast. Marissa's work with uplifting the feminine is a gift to the world and I am so grateful to be weaving our stories together.
You can listen to the episode at marissacorreia.com.

"In this episode Kailea shares about the times of media/news inundation we find ourselves in and her practice for staying present. How to really be with our hearts and what comes up when we hear these intense stories - and to not just put it down or chalk it up to the world, instead to really feel the impact and let that inform how we respond. We also speak about her growing curriculum, Earth is Ohana & the true meaning of Resistance. Kailea offers the question, “What could it mean for you / how could it feel for you to know your place of origination and to be standing and working from that place?”"

Within her

​waterways 
passageways
rivers
streams 
and tears.
The ancient 
and endless
cycle. 
Within her.

I am currently in collaboration with LOAM magazine as an artist- in- resident. The article below was written for and originally published by LOAM.

I write these words while the Eclipse is ongoing. I have not planned for this celestial event. I have not traveled out with my car into the world to stand in a field. Instead I stand in my yard and look up while a thick layer of fog casts out any glimpse I may have of the open sky. The world feels quieter and there is a flock of birds that call out again and again into the stillness, I wonder if they know. I can detect a subtle shift in the atmosphere and I feel truly alone for a moment.
I have not wanted to participate in the collective gathering of energy around the Eclipse and I do not fully know why. I do know that I am tired by the Eclipse posts in my feed and the repetitiveness that they represent. I do know that most days I feel angry and that at night an old type of fear has traveled its way into my bed. Before Charlottesville I was starting to lose my footing, post Charlottesville I can feel within my skin an under current of my old childhood temper. Flashes of red-hot, bursts through my bloodstream, the word ‘”fuck” comes out of my mouth frequently and I feel real hatred when I think of our current Presidents face. It’s the type of hatred that I so openly speak out against and that knowing makes me want to fall into myself and out from our mass channels of conversation. I don’t have something so pretty to contribute at the moment. I don’t have the energy to pick your spirits up. I want to tell you that there is a way forward, but I cannot be your guide. 
I have been re-reading a letter I wrote to Adam, my boyfriend about my fear. This was in the month of December, and I had yet to arrive back in the states post our disastrous election results. I had woken up from a dream where I had spoken out at a rally in support of Trump. I said “we have to resist. Do not listen to his lies. Get up off the ground, go home, you do not have to be here.” In the dream I knew that part of doing this would put me and the people that I loved in danger. I could feel that our right to publicly speak out was slowly being taken away. 
The night before writing this letter to Adam, I had watched what I would still consider the most impactful piece of media that I had taken in since the election. It was a video of Daryl Davis, the black man who is famous for befriending KKK members. A recent news article on him reads, ‘How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes’. This video back in December was the first time that I ever heard of Daryl Davis and this mans story was a direct confrontation to everything that I had been taught. I was suddenly held accountable to my own ideas of hope and the strong boundaries that encased them.  I realized I had never seen a black man standing next to KKK members, not counting a dead body swinging from a tree. I didn’t know this could be a possible reality and it felt as though a strong beam of light was shining down into my face. I felt like a hypocrite, hiding behind my fear of the perceived ‘other’. I quite literally had to raise my arm up and cover my face with my scarf from the friend that was watching this video with me. I felt ashamed as I started speaking out all of my fear. Childhood thoughts surfaced. Men in white robes are the images of my nightmares, I realized that this ingrained fear I have been carrying my whole life led to thoughts like, “These people are not human. These people are demons… these people.” I tell my friend, “I’ve only ever had two friends that were Republican. I have been raised in such an us, them mentality.” My world seems so small against the story of Daryl Davis. I am shaking inside to think about the possibility of really deconstructing these walls that I have been shaped by. I hear the stories of my family told to me at bedtime, about the one time my Indian father encountered a KKK member, how the man spoke hate into his long native hair. I am thoroughly saturated through by my mother’s plea for my safety, “Kailea the rules are different for you because you are brown. If the police stop you, you must comply. Please be safe!” I have been knowingly and unknowingly diligently building up walls of security over the past 26 years. There has always been the feeling to be small in moments of mass fear, to glide under the surface, to be an unnoticed face. This is our family’s way of survival. 
I have never let these thoughts move out of my mouth into the air. I have never let them be fully realized and I feel foolish as they burst forward in my babbling. I am not brave. I am a human girl. I harbor prejudice that can be seen through the scarf that I hold over my face. When I finish talking, my friend hugs me and I cry. Suddenly there is space to think the words, “What is possible?” It had never fully occurred to me on such an embodied level that I could meet hate crimes with humanity. The idea of it grates against my insides; I take a breath and call it a night. 
That was eight months ago. Eight long months in which we have been watching our government accelerate into its own inevitable collapse, taking a part of our society with it. Eight months of a continuing rise of white supremacists. Eight months of each of our own personal turmoil as we look for shelter in the echo chambers of our feeds.  I know just as much as you that there will be no solace there, yet I can’t stop looking for it even as I can feel the sucking of our progressive views becoming smaller and smaller. I am not satisfied by anyone’s anger, least of all mine. 
And then Charlottesville happens and it is like watching every one of my childhood nightmares come out of the night. I have been waking up from sleep and shaking Adam’s arm and speaking my fear into the dark while he tries to listen half asleep and tries to comfort while wrapping me in his arms. I lay there still awake unable to shake this feeling in my bones, it feels ancient this type of fear.
I have a personal strict protocol to not move forward fueled by hate, and so instead I have been stalled out. I know this is not what you want to hear. I am still moving, just in place. I put in my hours, check off my to-do’s and when I can, I walk up into the hills where you can hear the dry sounds of summer crack the long grasses in half. I find a bit of fuel in books just like I always have and I think everyday about how to tell the truth about the fact that I feel more and more uncomfortable in the left. How the spaces made to help POC and native people feel ‘safe’ make me furious.  I feel I don’t belong anywhere. I am tired of being so careful with my words. I am tired of fitting myself into neatly crafted PC packages. I am yearning to be in conversation with people brave enough to say it wrong, brave enough to say, “I don’t know.” Our lack of exploration leads me nowhere. All of our right-ness is starting to sound very similar to everything that we say we stand against. I am starting to forget what it is we stand for. I miss hearing into the true words of people’s hearts. 
Today is the day of the Eclipse. I have not read any of the horoscopes, and the fog of the North Bay blocked out my view of the sun. Instead I went and sat down in my own yard. It was not mystical, it was not deep, it was just me and my tomato plants, my half drunk cup of coffee going cold, the feeling of dry soil against my feet. I placed a prayer down for this emptiness that I feel in the form of a contained circle made of dried bachelor button petals. Dark purple, indigo, light pink, the colors tell the age of each flower, bleached lighter and lighter by days growing under the strength of the sun. Here we are as well, running around in our frantic pain while the sun ticks time, day after day. Putting ourselves to bed in the well-known fears of the past. Asking for something different while we practice all the same motions. Forgetting that we are more alike, than different, forgetting that we are rarely original in our thoughts about the world. 
 Rumi left us with the well-known lines, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” There are more words though that are part of this particular passage that are less known. They read, “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.” 
I am putting down my big ideas of making sense of any of this. Instead I am asking for the courage to live into a humble life; a life where there is space to speak my fears and to hear yours too, before we set them down.
The Eclipse is over now.

​On Saturday I was filled again and again by watching how other people interacted with our booth. Flowers for homes, flowers for lovers, flowers for a bride, flowers just for the moment. A pause in our policies, a pause in our collective pain. For all of our stumbling and uncertainty, the natural world awaits our return. ​