Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Community.

Wars, chocolate chip cookies, and the impacts on us, externally — internally. (Hang on below to see the zine curated by my dear friend, Sarah van Gelder.)

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

― Michel Foucault

It isn’t trite to say when I pick up my newsfeed on any of the current platforms, I prepare for shock. The only thing predictable about fascism is how it will continue to degrade our consciouses, other humans.

Bombs fall in Iran. Our political leaders dress domination up as destiny. I keep thinking about how supremacy arranges the world through force: who matters, who is sacrificed, who is collateral, and whose grief is rendered invisible. The current war widens daily—beyond dehumanizing rhetoric into destruction: schoolchildren murdered, economies destabilized, and fear spreading far beyond borders. Countries like the Philippines feel the ripple effects through food and energy shortages, despite having no say in whether this war began.

And I wonder—do we, in the United States, really feel the weight of what our tax dollars fund? There’s no way we can, all of the time. And then. I know I feel it. Like feel it. Feel it.

War and then this.

My daughter, Estela, on a Sunday afternoon, in the kitchen making chocolate chip cookies.

She measures ingredients, dumping flour, extra chocolate chips (only semi-sweet), and pecans. In another bowl, everything is ready for mixing banana bread. She is baker, both serious and tender. There is a different order of power here, one organized around care. Not destruction, but nourishment. Not spectacle, but devotion.

It’s hard to feel human these days, as stories and politics, and silences pile up. This is the split—global violence, sweet rhythms, held in our collective nervous system.

So - cookies.

Maybe that is a part of what we are called to protect : the small, human practices that refuse cruelty. A warm tray from the oven. The offering of something home made. The choice to feed one another. Estela reminds me that another world is still being practiced—in kitchens, tenderness, and making something good.

Beyond this, we smile, hug, protest, demonstrate, and maybe we don’t pay all of our taxes—defund the war machine. We disrupt what we can, and where we inevitably fall short, we practice grace—learning to speak to ourselves with the same care we offer others.

The anxiety is real. It creeps in, presses on the edges of whatever peace we find. I have a hundred ways to move through it—and still, some days, it isn’t enough.

May we find ourselves closer and closer to the edges, like Father Boyle says:

“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

I want to see you more as kin—not to shirk responsibility, but to deepen it. To take better hold of love, because love is what holds us together. Even here, right now.

In Solidarity,

Danielle

Click on the link below for the latest podcast.

Here’s the final version, which can be downloaded to print or to view as a PDF: Community as Strategy: 10 Ways to Create Belonging and Power Where You Live .

The zine is Creative Commons, free to download and print, no sign-up required. I’m getting positive feedback from those reading it in the wake of this weekend’s No Kings protests.

On power and human behavior (Jenny)

“It led to a lot of theory around people put in positions of dominance and power are going to have the worst parts of humanity come out of them. That it’s like, can anybody really hold on to positions of power and not compromise something of themselves? Of course, the degrees of that might vary. But I just think our psyches and our bodies are not meant for these power vacuums that these worlds create.”

On cultural definitions of leadership and power (Jenny)

“There are definite archetypes of power in Western society, and if you don’t possess those personality traits, character traits, physical traits, whatever, you will be a person who’s not in power… We value certain character traits and define them as the characteristics of a leader. And so does that sort of predispose some of this behavior because of what we define as an effective leadership trait versus what we define as unwanted traits?”

On hierarchical attachment and trauma cycles (Danielle)

“Instead of us being attached to one another—like a horizontal attachment—we’re more attached to power, to hierarchy. And that’s inherently based on who is going to be left out of humanity. So then a child learns something about the world that is contrary to their own development—that love doesn’t guarantee protection… and then we get what we get: these incessant cycles of trauma and harm and powerful men.”

On whiteness as a system of access (Rebecca)

“The very notion of whiteness is absolutely built on the question of who has access to resource and power and who does not… belonging itself is about access to power and privilege and resource. And so the frame itself is already built around power—not around something like love. And so whatever you have to do to get in, the exchange becomes: I will give up parts of myself to have access.”

On the instability of belonging in America (Rebecca)

“There is the ‘bring me your tired masses,’ and yet there is this strain through history that says, ‘We don’t really mean that.’ And if you come over here, depending on who is in power at the time, it’s a fifty-fifty shot—you’re going to get an actual welcome or a betrayal of that invitation. That’s the identity crisis of the country.”

On collective vs. individual survival in marginalized communities (Rebecca)

“When you get into marginalized communities, there is often this sense that what the whole needs far outweighs what the individual needs. And that leaves you vulnerable to the expectation that you would sacrifice yourself… because if you don’t, you risk expulsion from the community. And if you’re already marginalized, being pushed out of even that community is a terrifying possibility.”

On the harm of speaking without accountability (Rebecca)

“The harm that simply comes from, ‘I told you what happened and you turned your back on me,’ is enough. Even if nothing else happens—no job loss, no retaliation—that alone is a harm unto itself. That you said nothing, that you did nothing.”

On accountability and the absence of community (Jenny)

“You can’t have accountability without community, and most white-bodied people are not in community. Everything is so insular—your house, your car, your cubicle—that there isn’t the kind of interdependence required for accountability to actually take place.”

On community-based accountability and reintegration (Rebecca)

“What I hear in that model is not just accountability, but accountability rooted in reintegration—this idea that there is a path back, a path of redemption. That whatever has happened, there is still a way to return to belonging… and that requires something from both the person who caused harm and the person who was harmed.”

On harm as a community condition (Danielle)

“I think of sexual assault as a sickness in the community. And I think of suicide many times as a failure of the health of a community as well… What is the community willing to look past? Because as it turns out, they’re willing to look past almost anything before it gets to the point of actual harm.”

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Community.

Trigger Warning - sensitive content, be kind. If you need to close this email up, please do so. Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz devoted a section of his The Labyrinth of Solitude to Mexico’s obsession with chingar and its many conjugations, so I’ll direct you to el maestro:

“What is the Chingada? The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the difference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonor consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican, it consists in being the fruit of a violation.”

Ninety-six years old. Dolores Huerta. Ninety-six years old.

Paz writes of the Chingada as the violated mother, and the child as the inheritance of that rupture—identity born not from mutuality, but from force. Power that extracts. A theory of origin marked by breach. A body beginning in a world where power enters through opening without consent.

And then I think of Dolores Huerta—ninety-six years old—speaking what her body has held for decades.

What does it mean for a woman to carry violation inside a movement built on liberation? To organize, march, feed, and build—while holding a silence that protects the very structure that made her unsafe? In the golden years of matriarchy—abuela, mother, leader—still holding.

The body knows this contradiction.

Paz names the wound as origin, but here the wound is also sustained.

It is visceral. If you’ve ever heard the heat-of-the-moment slang—“Vete a la chingada!”—you heard its weight. Sometimes masked in laughter, sometimes not. It is not simply “go to hell.” It carries something heavier—gray space, rupture, emptiness, loss.

The insult hijo de la chingada encodes both somatic and cultural memory: origin itself is marked by rupture. Not simply sexual shame, but the inheritance of violation.

If the Chingada is the mother forcibly opened, then what do we call the woman who must close herself again — so the collective can survive? And this is where Paz’s frame stretches, but does not fully work. Because this is not only about being born from violation— this is about being asked to continue it inwardly.

And if this is the inheritance—then the question is what we do with it in our own bodies, our own communities.

There could be pages written, books, really. Here are a few gentle encouragements: believe survivors, notice where your body wants to turn away, and stay rather than retreat from discomfort. We are learning, together, how to build spaces where truth can land without requiring silence in return. Where kindness is foundational and love is truly guiding us.

Dolores Huerta reminds us of the risk:

“I think that women when they do come forward with their stories, that instead of getting the kind of support that they need, they get attacked, or they’re not believed. We’ve seen this happen throughout history, and so I think we’ll just have to deal with that if it does happen. Hopefully it won’t, but if it does, we’ll just have to deal with it…”

May we be the kind of community that answers that reality differently—with care, courage, and with a willingness to hold what is true.

Danielle

Normal in Chaos – Mom Diaries of 2025

In the morning, I roll over. Crisp air greets my nose. There’s a stuffy here—actually, a few. Two bunny rabbits from old friends. A small bug-shaped one from Estela that fits into tiny hands. Two plush penguins. And a furry blanket I keep at the top of my pillow. All there. Every night.

My youngest son gave me the penguins. I love hugging one of them at night. My window is propped open to the left of my bed, bordering the street. A solid shade is cranked up to let night breezes in. On the cooler summer Pacific Northwest evenings, I savor the brisk air against my legs. One leg under the blankets, one leg out.

Lucy, our standard-sized goldendoodle, sleeps between the bed and a pile of books on the left. She used to curl up beside me but migrated to the floor in summer. Her hair is longish. She pats her tail against the floor when I say her name.

Surrounded.

Summer swallowed all six of us in grief, even as exuberant joys birthed recitals, graduations, races, Mariachi gigs, and school finished well. It was punctuated by family disagreements over what constitutes a worthy “American,” the sudden—yet not sudden—death of my brother-in-law before he reached 45. Descansa en paz, Ricardo. And, a worn-thin relationship between one of our dogs and a neighbor. The puppy said goodbye to this earth in our home and now rests behind the house, beside an apple tree we planted, gifted by a friend.

Light trails in through the window along with air, now. Lucy thumps her tail on the ground. It’s that time. I grab my glasses from the nightstand and enter the bathroom. I start the water in the tub, pee, wondering about the coming weeks, drifting through files of our long summer.

The summer wasn’t my favorite. Estela recently said, “This wasn’t the worst summer, but it was the saddest.” We didn’t say much more, but the list of what can take a person down kept mounting. I realize I forgot to mention an entire August consumed by emergency room visits, a surgery, and longer-than-expected recovery.

Flashes of toxic retribution theology snake through the categories—Am I being punished? Am I bad for my family? Are my sins inflicting pain on my kids? Woah. Just writing that hurts. Like stabs-in-the-heart pain. I press my right hand to my chest, maybe to reassure myself I’m not dying.

“It’s only anxiety,” I whisper.

But my moods dictate my writing, and so you get the most unguarded emotions here. I’m not overly focused on sadness, but the truth is that life sometimes feels like leaping from one trauma to the next. How can I navigate that—and bring my family safely through the wild rapids? I don’t want that for them. Dear God. I wanna swear, but in the mornings I am more patient.

Julie’s recital in June was wonder. Graduation, brilliant. May was marked by her personal bests in the 400 and qualifying for so many district events she couldn’t even compete in them all. And she’s just one of my kids.

Each child fills my thoughts—their goodness, the love I have for them, memories as their smiles crack when teasing me.

Steam rises from the tub. I pour in a generous share of lavender-scented Epsom salts. I splurge. Hopping in, I place a towel behind my head and settle in for a good soak. The scratchy salts dissolve, surround my skin.

Moms do what makes sense.

Las Vegas. The last time I was at the airport, headed to New Mexico with a dear friend, I couldn’t stop thinking of Las Vegas. We’d planned a family stay there for a few nights in an Airbnb before running off to camp in the wilds of northern Arizona near the pink coral dunes. I’d spent hours researching Hipcamp reviews, zooming in on campsite photos, plotting an assisted ChatGPT itinerary we didn’t follow at all. Still—it all went into a family Google Doc. Not only that, we’d prepared our dog sitters with keys, treats, detailed instructions. This was primed and ready to go well.

Special.

I see their faces waiting to board the plane, slightly irritating one another, but we don’t give it much attention. It’s an energy born of the frenetics of goodness we’d waited for all year.

Interrupted. The same neighbor with the same beef about the same dog. It became a race to change locks, numerous calls to the family watching our home, and every moment until we stepped into our home, a moment of anxiety for one of the six of us.

In a rush—everyone anxious, nerves frayed—we slept one last night under the stars before a 2 a.m. scramble for a flight change to take us home.

The phone had rung a week prior to our Las Vegas trip, and I was nervous to answer.

“Hello?” I said.

I knew who the caller was—my dear friend. But still, AI doesn’t give you much confidence.

“Hey, Danielle—I didn’t leave those voicemails. That wasn’t me.”

Maybe I knew that. Maybe I didn’t. But I did know, despite it being a Sunday, that I would confirm it wasn’t my friend changing her mind and telling me to do something that felt far too dangerous relationally and hard.

She went on to speak, but those are words I don’t remember. Derelict spies converged on my life to harass and maybe destroy something good. Or maybe it was an inside job all along, sabotage from toxic theology, again.

My reveries and spider-web memories catch me. I find the water rapidly cooling. There are only minutes left if I’m to make it on time. I drag myself from the tub after a vigorous scrub, tuning in to the silence—once filled by chatter, yelling, screeches, or giggles.

It is Tuesday.

“Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you've never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it's a loving thing to do.

You speak someone else's words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.

What you're doing now is listening to me, in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren't funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word.”

― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

Dear Colleagues, Friends, and Community.

One of my weekly habits is to drive across the Agate Pass Bridge to Elevate Strength and Conditioning. My midday breaks are filled with familiar faces who joke, smile, sometimes cry, talk about whatever, and remind me to give my “Max Effort.”

Just last week driving across this bridge, after arguing with myself about “why am I anxious again?” I realized every day, like 2020, I wake to an expectation of a national tragedy, gun violence, racial threats somewhere — the most powerful leaders in our country with the loudest microphones amplifying anything hateful for political gain.

In my private practice, I would say that is PTSD, except what do we call it when it repeats and we have no power to stop it?

What can we actually control? Political choices are split between two very narcissistic parties, often only interested in the self preservation of a certain way of making money, with rarely any consideration for the human lives they impact.

I am pessimistic — drawn into the fight by what I judge to be the survival, dignity, preservation of an idea of hope — and the fight for what life could actually be if built on freedom and love. Recently, a friend and I conversed about one fundamental premises for living; she lives in a world where dominant culture allows her to predict the outcomes of her every day interactions: work, love, play, care. I see another way of living, where the only thing predictable is there is no way to know when the next unmanageable circumstance will arrive, and no idea how to prepare for it other than to gamble on hope and love.

To choose hope, to choose faith, to choose community, not in the false way of “moving forward,” but a “moving through” is an inhaling of oxygen, despite our justified and necessary hyper-vigilance which are also protecting us from the very air we breathe.

My vote for local and national political candidates is one way I participate in a journey towards freedom, love and peace. But, I will not accept these in false forms.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King states, “If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated polically, humiliated and segregated, I dont want peace. In a passive non-violent manner we must revolt against this peace. Jesus says in substance, I will not be content until justice, goodwill, brotherhood, love yes, the kingdom of God are established upon the earth. This is real peace. Peace is the presence of positive good.”

I won’t placate authoritarians telling me there is no other way forward except through war and genocide. I stand against state sanctioned murder of humans on death row. The notion that positive good can come through the death of children in schools at the hands of guns is false.

Resmaa Menakem states, “So, they (white bodies) may be shocked into action for a short period of time, but there is no cultural container to hold the charge of race so something else can emerge. So what happens is, the genuflect is to go back to the way that things were already, and get fatigued very easily, and not hold to that for a long time. So, for me, my posit is that this generational thing is not going to be able to be sustained and cultivated in one generation. I believe it’s going to take at least nine generations for that to happen, given the fact of how long we have had to contend with the idea of race, at least over 400 years, we have to contend with it. So to think that it’s going to be assuaged in two years because you’re doing some work or three years because you’re doing some work is a misnomer, that won’t happen.”

I vote to honor a responsibility I feel to my ancestors, steward my love of freedom, and move forward through feeling - thinking - and being toward multi=generational change.

Phew. Lots to say. Will you join me in this long work?

Danielle