The Renewal of Hope

Beloved friends,

Oh, what a feeling! This Blue Tsunami is such a balm, such a healing thing. Election night here was a wonderful mirror-reversed reversion of election night ten years ago – we kept staying up later and later; the news kept getting better and better; we kept getting happier and happier. The diversity of the representation we have chosen is glorious! So many Black people, Indigenous people, Latinx people, Abdul El-Sayed calling JD Vance "habibi" in the clearest interlingual version of "Bless his heart". All those women, trans people, nonbinary people heading into office. Democratic Socialist mayors for LA and DC. Utah is sending the first Tongan-American representative. Our first out gay male Senator in Chris Pappas. My queer Latina Representative Emily Randall won re-election. I am sure I have missed all kinds of representation that is wonderful. This kind of diversity gives me hope: all of these people who stepped up, willing to lead, and all of the people who said yes. Thank goodness.

I spent a lot of James Talarico's acceptance speech shouting FUCK YES as he spoke overtly about the politics of love. I hope with my whole heart that he is effective at governing because my heart yearns for leaders who talk like this:

My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.

Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.

Here's the whole speech, to read or watch:

I first wrote here about James Talarico in March 2025. A dear friend sent me a link of him giving a sermon. I had painful childhood experiences with Christianity and did not want to watch a Texan Christian politician giving a sermon, but I trusted my friend, so eventually I sat down to it. I ended up in the good kind of tears and it healed my heart to hear him speak about how Christians have a moral duty to fight Christian Nationalism.

Another place where love in action struck me strongly this week was in the work of Democrats to build bridges in Mississippi. My friend Dan Ancona of Way to Win and the Way to Lead PAC wrote a beautiful article about how their organization, whose "core strategy is understanding and assembling the kinds of multi-racial voting coalitions needed to build a safe, prosperous, and sustainable future for this country", sought to connect with Republican voters in service of Scott Colom's senatorial campaign. If you like statistics and strategy, this post will be sweet sweet candy. I'm not that kind of wonk, but I loved it, too, because of how it showed me the way we made change in this election not with divisiveness and attacks but with care and curiosity.

Political Strength Training: Working to Reverse the Southern Strategy in Mississippi

Data and ads from inside the campaign. These are some of the strongest ads we’ve ever tested.

Charting the Way ForwardDan Ancona

Scott Colom took a beautiful step himself, reaching out to his Republic neighbors directly by visiting the folks lined up outside a Trump rally and simply talking to them about what they care about.

This is beautiful, this politics of connection, love, justice, and equality. Politics has become a dirty word in these painful years of late, but politics is how we enact our shared values to create the structures of our world. This a marvelous endeavor, and something that is not other, but intimately touches us all in our everyday living, as the last couple years have painfully shown us.

In this moment where you might have access to relief, joy, hope, or grief, I encourage you to lean into them. It's been a wild decade. We've endured terrible things. As we reached this second presidency of That Man I've noticed a big increase in the need of people as a whole to compartmentalize. The overt grieving and rage of the earlier part of the decade has been harder to access for most people. Folks have been stuffing it all down in order to carry on.

This week was like opening the door of a stuffy room. Fresh air, fresh light, fresh hope. If you have access to good feelings right now, I encourage you to lean into that. Bask in it. Drink it up. Shine the light of that good feeling into every cell, into all of your nooks and crannies, under the rugs where you've been sweeping the things you Couldn't Even with. Bring as much healing into your body as you can. Sop. it. up. I encourage you to stoke that good feeling by reading more good news and connecting with others to celebrate. Relish and linger in this relief, joy, and hope if you possibly can.

It is also possible that you're feeling grief or sorrow. Sometimes, when endurance has asked our whole attention and we finally reach safety, everything we pressed aside to make it through safely rushes forth. So this may also be a moment where you have fresh access to grief. That is a tender path to walk, but it can be a blessing, too, because grief needs to flow. Ungrieved pain doesn't tend to lessen, it sits quietly until the next time sorrow comes knocking and then there is all the more to grieve. If you are feeling safe enough to grieve now, it might help to think of that as an opportunity. Let the pain and sorrow move so that they do not crystalize within you. Let it go, let it flow.

Of course, not all the news is good in this election. For me and many of my neighbors in Washington state, the passing of a bill banning trans girls from school sports is tragic. The willingness to embrace the complexity of living is vital for me here. I am basking in all the good I can to heal and nourish myself – I'm also making connections for the work that lies ahead. If you were in my local classes this week I promised some resources – here are two organizations I've signed up to get information from so that I can get more active in supporting the human rights of our trans and gender diverse kin in WA if that moves you: Seattle's Lavender Rights Project and Traction PNW. If you've got other resources, send 'em my way.

Breathing deeply,
Dahlia

Resources

Various Aspects of the Sky
Between the shift to daylight savings and the emotions around these massive political events, this week has been a doozy. This is showing up on the cosmic level with five planets in retrograde, which astrologers say is a time to turn energy inward, to heal, review, and renew. I found this article useful food for reflection.

If you're wanting a little refreshment, this NY Times series is lovely: it invites you to spend 10 minutes in contemplation of a piece of art; in this case, Georgia O'Keeffe's painting Above the Clouds. I regret that I cannot share the image; Georgia died in 1986 and copyright lasts 70 years after the death of an artist, so this piece does not yet belong to all of us. But it's right here. Or perhaps you'd like to spend 10 minutes simply staring at the clouds, or a piece of art in your own home.

If it's the night sky that calls you in this season of the long darkness, the first half of November is lush with meteor showers and the mornings are brightened with the return of Venus as the morning star. I have been loving the fact that waking earlier due to daylight savings has left me watching the waning moon this week before dawn, so bright and crisp as the cold night skies make for less haze. Can you see the difference? I was so tickled to learn recently what that is.

Visible planets and night sky guide for November

Visible planets and night sky guide. The slender waning moon meets Venus and the star Spica before sunrise tomorrow morning. Look low in the east as dawn breaks.

EarthSky | Updates on your cosmos and worldMarcy Curran

Spreading the Love
The Kindness Mob began at the turning of the new year in 2023 when Tyler Brickley of Kansas City set out to be the change. Over 600,000 people now take part in this movement to flood the internet with kindness. They choose social media posts where folks have been bullied and show up en masse with simple love and appreciation. That this is happening isn't named; ideally, folks just experience the trolls outweighed by the lovingkindness of strangers. You could be one of them.

The Kindness Mob | Kindness for Everyone, Always

We flood social media with kindness every single day. Join the mob and make someone’s day.

BBC

Resistance

After the November 2024 election I leaned hard into Rebecca Solnit's classic Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” --Bill McKibben “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” --The New Yorker A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Haymarket BooksRebecca Solnit

My friend Jessie led a community reading immediately after the election and I led one after the new year, so I got to read it twice. It gave me a new vision of political activism as a form of being joyfully present in the collective life of community. This was the seed of my now more than a year long practice of daily activism. This week I was thanking Jessie for that in my Workshop for Living and was absolutely delighted when another member of the group asked to hear more, saying that a combination of personal healing supported by our work together and the collective healing of that election joy moment were leading her to want to step up. She asked for the link to my Resistance resources doc. Maybe you're feeling that, too? I am hearing in some people a fresh willingness to speak to their representatives now that we have more power. I know I called all of mine yesterday to thank and congratulate them – and to ask that they not vote for Schumer and Jeffries, that they embrace this Tsunami as a call from us all for CHANGE in our political leadership.

Resistance

Hi! I’m Dahlia, Kristie Dahlia Home. I support living. I’m a spiritual mentor: I teach meditation, yoga, offer counsel and healing touch. I’m not a professional activist or organizer; I’m a writer, a teacher, a lover, an inspirer. People come to talk to me because they want to think about how t…

Google Docs

Maybe you're feeling inspired, but differently? Or need a bit of a boost? I've got Curtis White's On Resistance on my wishlist. If you get to it before I do, I'd love to hear what you think!

"In On Resistance, Curtis White offers spiritual hope and intellectual fortification for those in despair about the bankruptcy of American life. Drawing on a range of books, films, essays, and artworks, White shows how our rich collective literary heritage gives us mental ammunition for our fight against the forces that would reduce us all to commodities and consumers. In doing so, he has penned a new classic in the noble history of American polemics."

On Resistance by Curtis White: 9781685892692 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

From the writer Elle calls the “most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment” comes a hands-on, don’t-lose-hope study of how writers, painters, musicians, and other cultural figures respond to fascism…

Penguin Random HouseDismiss

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