“The fact that you are still capable of being horrified is a credit to your humanity, so allow yourself a moment to grieve” ~ Helio
At the end of the last week’s piece, Shaping the Future in Times of Upheaval, I wrote that I would go into what we can bring to this moment in terms of strategies for change, solidarity, practices, empowerment … and how my work is taking shape and who it is for.
It occurred to me today, though, that this is a moment to dive deeper into the powers of grief, shock and outrage many are feeling about any number of circumstances taking place in their lives right now as a necessary means by which transformation can result.
When we can consciously dive into these powers, we find they carry enormous intelligence; therefore, ‘what to do’ becomes an holistic, empowered, natural result and it comes straight from the heart.
What precipitated this change is the resumption of the carpet-bombing of Gaza by Israel at 2am local time 18 March 2025, massacring approximately 400 and wounding approximately 500 in those early hours of the morning. I watched the devastating footage of mainly women and children in real time.
The terror last night and today of my friend and ‘little brother’ in Gaza, Adam Rjele (to whose campaign a few of you have donated in the past), and of those massacred or dealing with the aftermath of death or maiming, along with forced
evacuations… hit me at a visceral level.
Adam was in the midst of it all with his 7-member family in the city of Khan Yunis, where a number of massacres took place and evacuation orders were delivered. I have not heard from my other friend, Osama, who lives with his family of
5 further north in Gaza City, which was also attacked.
Like millions globally last night, I was reeling. My heart was shattered by the brutality that unfolded —the relentless violence and devastation that the world allows and watches in silence or complicity. It has been the deadliest 24 hours since 2023, and touted to be ‘just the beginning.’
And since then, I have received the messages I’ve been receiving for at least a year now—desperate pleas for donations to GoFundMe campaigns: people trying to scrape together enough to escape (where?) and to keep their families alive amid the carnage. It hurts deeply to feel people so dehumanized and begging for survival, knowing that whatever I personally give, it is inadequate.
The humanitarian tragedy is not just the extreme violence itself, but the tragedy of the world looking away and rationalizing immense suffering. It’s the tragic reflection of us and what it tells us about us.
It’s the indignity of human beings being reduced to numbers or ‘human animals’, not even as human beings with names and families and dreams, stripped of everything —and having to convince the world that they are
human beings, too.
Today, I have been grieving for all this and also for the fierce resistance of those in Gaza who have been standing
up to unimaginable violence for 17 months and who are about to experience even more unless the perpetrators are made to stop by an awakened world.
Ancestral Legacy
This pain exists for me at a soul level and as a calling to act through my own background, which many of you know. Specifically, my grandfathers—both of them—stood up to fascism and paid the ultimate price. One, a French
national, died in an Italian concentration camp under Mussolini. The other was executed by firing squad under Franco’s regime. Both refused to be silent, and both were killed for their courage in brutal wars. Their legacy lives on in me. Their blood runs through my veins, shaping how I meet this world.
In moments like these, I feel the power and weight of who they were—the fierce courage with which they stood up—and
the call to not only bear witness but to act. To speak truth about tyranny, genocide and human rights, no matter how brutal or unpopular. To stay human and willing to be ripped apart as part of personal and collective transformation.
"The easiest way to lose your own rights is to ignore the loss of others' (rights)." ~ Martin Niemöller, German Lutheran pastor and theologian, writer of the poem “First They Came For” (1946)
Last night and this morning, I found myself staring into space, just wanting to curl up and not face the day— fully aware that I have the luxury and privilege to do this while millions do not.
I could feel the desire to numb out—not only to the violence taking place in real time to my friends, but also to the knowledge of what we all know is possibly coming: extermination and expulsion via the Israeli industrial-scale war
machine, as supplied mainly by the United States. (Within just 60 days, Trump has bypassed Congress to approve over $12 billion in weapons for Israel—including 500-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles.)
My grandfathers didn’t choose safety—they chose truth. Their courage reminds me that spirituality and transformation are not just personal—they are collective. It’s about being willing to take a stand, even when it’s uncomfortable or dangerous.
Why Standing up is Critical
“Let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t” ~ Andrea Gibson
Last year, through the 5-part article series, “Who Bombs Hospitals and Inherits the Earth” and again in last week’s essay, I stressed the importance of why caring about Gaza is critical. Not ‘just’ because a globally-recognized genocide is being brutally enacted upon a besieged population, but also because if our governments can so flagrantly violate international law, choose to blow up or burn babies alive, reduce cities, hospitals, museums, and schools to rubble, collectively punish and starve civilian populations as a weapon of war, it demonstrates that not only do they not care about international law, those human beings, the most defenseless of us all or their cities: they do not care about you or the Earth.
And when we don’t care that they don’t care, we give them a green light to continue their crimes.
You must be aware by now of the actions being undertaken by the world’s governments to not only support and cover up the extermination and expulsion taking place in Gaza, but also the connection of these to the gutting of human rights, free speech, protest, and assembly in our own countries. The gaslighting, smearing, firing, cancelling, and arrests.
We know what this is. We have seen it before. We studied it in school.
These are all interconnected to the polycrisis outlined in the previous essay and throughout last year’s work, and that you would know from your own observations.
It’s for this reason that author, facilitator and speaker Yuval Mann wrote today:
Palestine is the portal to collective liberation. It sits right at the cross
section of settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy
and their genocidal, eco-terrorist, insatiable, expansionist thirst for
oil and domination. I feel so much grief and sorrow today thinking about
Palestinians left to carry the load of this brute violence.
Staying Human and Awake for True Compassion
Staying human, staying awake, and continuing to act while the world burns are fiercely courageous acts I see taking place globally. Every act, even the seemingly smallest one, is contributing to the fabric that creates the critical mass required to shift the existing planetary dynamic of violence and the normalization of it.
Staying human and awake involves sitting with your grief, shock and outrage, your pain and shadows and those of the collective, and with a heart broken again by humanity’s inhumanity—knowing that in doing so, transformation and a
deeper commitment to collective liberation become inevitable because you feel it.
We need to know, see, and feel the terrain to be effective interpreters and creators —not be asleep to the diagnosis.
The more these old forces hurt, lie, maim, kill, poison, and destroy—the more national and international laws they break, and the more war crimes and injustices they perpetrate upon the most defenseless —the more they show who they really are. And the more awake the global community becomes, the more it rises.
But before this, there must be recognition and awakening. There must be steering clear of misapplying beautiful spiritual principles of acceptance and forgiveness when perpetrators are busy raping, destroying, torturing humans and the Earth.
Sometimes we think that our own personal transformation and freedom are independent of others’ transformation and freedom, but it is not so. We are tied together in shared belonging and mutual interdependence. Polycrisis affects us all: it is only our privilege that keeps us believing we are above or beyond it.
“The imperial boomerang will bring all that horror to your doorstep. Just a
matter of time. It might be their rights (or lives) now, but it’s your
rights next week.” ~ @pauliinaptln
What is happening to Adam and his family, to Osama and his family … what is happening in Gaza, Sudan, the US, Canada, the UK, Congo, Syria, Yemen, Serbia—all are interconnected.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." ~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Letter from Birmingham Jail
These crises are part of the same abusive patterns and systems that hurt us all—perpetrated by a very small number of people, but believed in, defended and adhered to by millions still.
Thich Nhat Hanh often taught that true compassion sometimes requires us to take a firm stand—not out of hatred or retribution, but out of love and a desire to protect both the victim and the perpetrator from further harm.
"If you are motivated by your desire to prevent the other person from
continuing to harm themselves and others, that is nonviolence. You act
with compassion to protect, not to punish." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Not only are perpetrators harming millions of people and the Earth, they are also harming their own Souls. It is a misapplied spirituality that allows our leaders to harm others, accept that harm as normal, and rush to forgive it or let it go. It is not spiritual to look away. It is not spiritual to accept abuse.
There is no awakening without reckoning with the darkness within and around us. Truth, healing, reconciliation
and justice must be served for peace and a New Earth to be possible. If our freedom rests or depends upon the subjugation of others, we are not free. We are perpetrators ourselves.
Normalizing genocide, state violence, deportations, rape, torture, starvation, expulsions, and land-theft—these are what we are being asked and conditioned to do.
We have been down this track so many times: must we keep doing it? Can we not see the well-worn script?
Hannah Arendt wrote of the "banality of evil" based on her observations during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi
officer responsible for organizing the Holocaust. She argued that evil is not always perpetrated by fanatical monsters but often by ordinary people who unthinkingly follow orders and participate in brutal systems without questioning their actions or moral responsibility.
She was referring to the chilling reality of how conformity and obedience can enable atrocities.
How much do they have to gaslight, use, and hurt us before we say ‘no’ to the enabling of atrocity with full measure?
Holding Space for Humanity and Truth
Staying awake in the face of violence and devastation is agonizing. It is easier to numb out, turn away, or slip into comfortable detachment. But transformation demands that we lean into the discomfort and the shadows, let them change us, and let them fuel our determination to bear witness, speak out, gather together, and create new systems.
We do it because we know all life is interdependent—woven together in a Quantum Field of Oneness, in the Web of Life.
Being resilient and staying present lead to power.
Refusing to normalize suffering results in enormous power.
Outrage, heartbreak, and grief—these are all parts of staying human and of retaining our humanity in a time when so much is attempting to dull our humanity, confuse it, or replace it entirely.
Choosing to feel rather than look away is power. It’s how we honour those who stood up or who are struggling to stand, be heard and seen right now. It’s how we honour ourselves as human beings with voice, power, purpose, and a
magnificence that perpetrators are attempting to silence and erase because you are not important to them.
To know, you must feel.
Call to Awareness and Responsibility
There are countless things you can do—and that are being done by millions globally right now—for any number of issues. I will address these next time.
But most critically, I invite you to allow yourself to feel, and to stay awake and stay human. From that powerful place of feeling and knowledge, your commitment and motivation naturally arise.
I invite you to feel into how personal growth and collective responsibility are two sides of the same coin of our interdependence and of transformation.
Look into what group(s) you may join, getting organized, taking action. All change requires sustained, organized
community and action. We are not alone, and you cannot do it alone.
I invite you to step beyond silence and complicity in the crimes our governments are enacting upon us and upon the Earth.
The perpetrators are not on humanity’s side: the changes we want to see in the world have to come from us—from our solidarity, empathy, humanity, and capacity to organize. Like they always have.
The world doesn’t need more silence. The world needs voices that refuse to normalize brutality and hearts that are courageous, awake and engaged.
This is the brutal reality of living awake in these times, of holding space with others who have also gathered with you at a time when a spiritual battle for the Soul of Humanity is raging and escalating.
Transformation means staying human. It means being willing to hold space for both outrage and heartbreak, your own and others’, and to bear witness and refuse to normalize the brutality.
It means giving where we can, even when it feels too small in the face of unimaginable need.
Don’t look away now: your own life and freedom depend upon you staying awake.
"Whatever you do, do not give way to the fear and panic. This is exactly what the hegemonic machine is hoping for. Feel the feelings and go organize. The work is never over—it started long before we were here and will continue after we are long gone. We are a beautiful part of a whole ancestral wave of love and wisdom. This ocean of care is far more
resilient than any measly fascist.” ~
Yuval Mann
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.