organizing is music
find a choir and practice
If you have not yet read this excellent piece making the rounds, “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won”-- start there. (You may not even need to return here! Be free of the internet! Run into the arms of your collaborators!) The article was so exactly on point more than a dozen organizers and friends sent it my way with one word: “This.”
In a moment when many of us are struggling to find sea legs on turbulent waters-- or perhaps are still just retching overboard-- this generous author, Daniel Hunter was at the ready to share some steady, calm navigation. Who was this voice from the future, helping us find each other, find our way? I looked Daniel up, curious which Aikido studio they’ve been practicing at to be this ready, in this stance even in this moment. Daniel has been working from the intersection of strategy and soul for years (he has a book by the same name). He teaches and refines collective strategy, makes space to do soul-care, and puts his body on the line with direct actions. This mix: strategy, soul, stance offers a balanced three-legged stool.
I do not intend to carve a pedestal for one uniquely exceptional superhero (though I appreciate your generous way- lighting, Daniel!) But we need no more individual exceptionalism, not one more opportunity to think: ‘well, maybe they will save us!’ Or: ‘I’m nowhere near that amazing, so what could I do?!’
In fact, Daniel’s self-description itself points away from the idea of their work as that of individual hero. Instead of the list of accolades, awards, and tiresome “40 under 40” lists prominent thinkers so often have as their bio, Daniel’s offers more a map of relationships. His bio shares an inventory of many, many people trying, praying, organizing, insisting, joining, moving together: “Quakers on building campaigns to stop mountaintop removal, those fighting for public sector employees with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, pastors in Sierra Leone, independence activists in Northeast India, environmentalists in Australia and Indonesian religious leaders.”
The morning after the election I needed to write the team I lead at my work. These are people who work on the front lines of the climate crisis, and a membership, many of whom have lost their homes and farms two times in the last two years due to flooding. We all know well what a political ordering that denies climate change will mean for the policies and programs that have very real impacts on our work and our people. Many of our crew (in fact, many in every group of people) feel personal safety concerns. Whether Queer folks, folks of color, people who immigrated, people living with disability, people taking care of kiddos and elders. The dehumanization language and vitriol we’ve heard these months put people on notice: be afraid.
What could I say to be brave and honest, actively hopeful and fierce. But. As the song leaders Abigail and Shawn Bengsons sing: “Hope is not a feeling/ hope is an action.”
[Watch for sustenance! Thank you, thank you Abigail and Shawn for your spells of endurance these years.]
Sometimes the only hope-action is remembering I am not alone, I do not have to know all the moves alone. I reached out to a mentor of mine, Niaz. Niaz has been pushing towards justice longer than I’ve been alive. We got connected through work, and I quickly saw that I wanted to learn from her. Niaz has a certain gravity about her; when she weighs in on a course of action, others fall silent, nodding, digesting. Niaz is able to see through the distractions of noise from real content, distinguish the froth churn of waves from the tip of a shark fin in the sea, and steer the ship accordingly. Niaz is banned from a lot of places due to her direct action work. (One of my favorite of her stories is an arrest at a long John Silvers protesting their plunder of the sea– she may have been dressed as a pirate? Perhaps that part is apocryphal— but very possible.)
The very best thing about Niaz is that she laughs often, loudly, heartily, head back and throat full. She embodies joy in hard work. Niaz makes me feel not only that change is possible, change is inevitable. It is already in her captain’s spyglass sight.
Years ago a friend and mentor told me: if you want someone to mentor you, ask them formally. (Movement lesson here: articulate a plan; embrace rigor around it.) So, some years back, after a few meetings in big groups with her I wrote to her. I want to learn how you to move more like you do. Could you help teach me?
Not everyone I have asked this question says yes. Some laugh it off. Some ignore it. Some say, I am too busy. Niaz said something humble but generous: I’m happy to share what little I know. Then, this ridiculously busy, head of a national organization badass said, I’ll send you questions every morning about what it means to be a leader. And then she did.
adrienne maree brown says: trust the people and they become trustworthy. I add: ask the people to help you and they will.
Early on Wednesday morning, Niaz responded to me quickly. (With the rigor, with the precision, with the care.) ‘Grace, it is OK to be speechless in any one moment. You can be without words today. Our work is not a moment.” I remembered over the summer when we were in Kentucky working together on a project. I was agitated about a new issue that I wanted to add to our shared work plan. Niaz kept calming my urgency down. I need to have the discipline of accepting this is going to take many generations. We know the work won’t be done in our lifetime: this is just our leg of the marathon.
I reached out to another mentor, James. He’s turning eighty this year and has been helping communities take care of each other through climate devastation for decades. There’s a similar story of how we connected. The asking. I sent James a text. The phone rang immediately. James greeted me: “I’m here. It’s good to hear your voice. Let’s breathe together for a second.”
There was a time I asked my father for a dollar, and he gave me a ten dollar raise/ and when I needed my mother and I called her/ and she stayed with me for days. - Emily Saliers
So much has emerged from being willing to pose the question to the universe: what is possible? how much we can count on each other? Very often I am surprised at how much is possible if only we ask.
And so, my elders got calm and clear to do my work. Today, grieve and pause and support and encourage. Allow yourself the time to digest and breathe. And move tomorrow.
A dear friend in Georgia who is one of a couple people who has been with me through it all: deaths, births, the stuff in between. She’s currently trying with her partner to get pregnant. They’re worried about what may happen if one of them needs an abortion at some point during pregnancy, what medical care would they have. Risks are real. Lives are at stake. My phone dings with love from her: Wellness check. She asks to see a picture of what I’m eating and drinking.
On election night, another friend invited us to eat pies together to quell the anxiety as polls came in, to not be alone. Another neighbor dropped by with baked goods the morning after the election and asked if she could just lay on the couch for the morning. I stay nourished because of my friends, because I am not alone.
My nine year old ran up the stairs. He busted through the door, all muddy and wet. He’s obsessed with pond mud lately, digging through the damp edges of a wetland, pressing his hands through the muck and dead plants to pull out malleable clay underneath. This layer of sub-soil clay is where the turtles burrow for the winter, sometimes emerging with a whole world taking root on top of them while they rest. Amos likes to dig his hands in a making tiny, detailed creations. He lays two clay creations on the floor: a braided bread and a small bird. I made these mama! Look! Do you love them?
Like Daniel, I assess the worth of my life by the list of my relations, the people I can show up for and who show up for me when I need them.
I have been so happy to hear a call to relationship with a lot of folks repeating the line, don’t despair, organize! But I’ve also wondered if we know what organize really means?
Organize is taking our sets of relationships and getting ever more skilled at doing hard things together.
If you have played sports, you probably have a helpful metaphor to employ here, but I’ve never been super great at following arbitrary rules to win points. I have, however, been one voice of many in choirs and singing groups.
Singing groups are communities in which we show up for practice regularly whether there is a concert coming up or not. In a choir, you must learn to find the same note and hold it together. Whether this learning happens by ear or eye or listening, there are many paths to how that learning happens—in a church pew, with a teacher, in friend groups on front stoops. However you learn, singing together requires discipline and precision, to be able to move together in tempo, words, pitch, volume—to move at the same time with others. It also requires differentiation and knowing your niche: the ability to hold one steady beat while another part moves off that first note to make a harmony, and then another and another. This is the same as the strength of an ecosystem, the wisdom of the earth. The skill of a choir is reflected by the amount of diversity of notes and beats it can hold and still move together. The more diversity, the richer the sound.
On the flip: if you try to make more than one note (do all the things as just one person) it just makes a strange noise, not music. Pick your note, pick your work, celebrate your niche. Stop wondering if you should be covering the bass line while singing soprano. Embrace your role and trust in others to do their part. That’s the only way the music really sings.
Group singing also means trusting the leaders -- section heads, musical accompaniment, conductors-- to be in sync together with subtle eye and body motions to shift the whole when needed. Join trusted organizations and people who have been in the work for longer than you.
Good singing requires practice, practice, practice, with rigor, accepting correction when you get it wrong and learning a different way. Training allows you to be ready to soar no matter whatever the piece of music you are handed. Keep showing up.
Group singing, when produced with attention to each other, without abandoning your self, with trust in leadership, can create transcendence, illumination. Sometimes, spirit shows up and the sound wraps you in a swath that is bigger than a lifetime, bigger than words or notes or people. Possibility. Wholeness. Make space for spirit. This is when a movement thrives. This is when we become more than just us, and the whole universe conspires.
Before the election I knew that whatever happened, I knew I needed to sing on Wednesday night. I didn’t know what to expect but I assumed we would be anxious and scared whatever was happening. I texted a friend to ask if we could use her community’s house of worship for it. Yes. (Trust the people.) I put out a quick post: No matter the outcome of the election, we need each other.
“In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.” - Bertolt Brecht.
There will be dessert too.
Yes, folks responded. What can I bring. How can I help. What do we need. (And they become trustworthy.)
There is a Sufi phrase: you take one step towards Gd, Gd takes ten steps towards you. People are the same. The best part about taking one action is ten people around you joining in. A friend sent me some money for the rental. Another picked up name tags for the welcome table. A third came to my house and baked all day to prep food for our sing. A fourth sent song suggestions and a fifth brought his steel guitar to accompany. I could go on to ten small acts of helping. Not me, us. This is practice.
There will be bigger tests, much, much harder tests of community. We will have to face, (perhaps we are already facing, have been facing for years): what are you willing to do for each other? Some questions to consider at this moment: Are you willing to stand up when your neighbors are threatened with deportation? When your trans patient needs medical care or a pregnant person needs an abortion? Are you ready to share resources when climate catastrophe hits and there isn’t a plan? Many people in our country have long been at this level of being tested. Many have already shown their bravery, their endurance. Look around: people who can teach you, who you can learn from.
Black people, women, queer people, immigrants, poor people must be our core teachers, our leaders— those who have been charting these waters for generations already. These are the people in our country who have the knowledge, experience, and resilience of moving through deep, personal challenge. It comes as no surprise that most excellence in protest/ grief/ hope singing traditions have also been protected by Black women.
[Growing up in Atlanta, taking in Sweet Honey concerts at Spelman or marching in an MLK JR Parade while Bernice Johnson Reagon (z”l) rang out the call was part of the shared culture.]
Some of us still have more privileges and safety; we haven’t yet felt we had to choose what we will do to keep each other safe. I suggest it’s time we test our muscles. Lift the smaller weights, do what we can. Sing the songs you can learn with the skill you have today. Shift resources. Get involved. Next, learn a song with quicker notes, dissonant harmonies. Feel the stretch. Take a personal risk to speak truth. As you learn to hold your part against what at first sounds impossible, you must also learn to trust in the composer, to embrace the tension in notes right up close to one another. Be braver. Keep practicing. We all need the practice. Take it gently when we can. Breathe. Know that more tests, harder ones, will come. Sing This Little Light. Keep showing up. Start to feel the melodies working inside you, even when you are “alone.” Begin to feel yourself as the music, let it flow through you as a vessel. Way will open. Speak truth.
On Wednesday night, around seventy five people packed into a house of worship, lit up bright in the dark of northern night. Some folks knew each other, most didn’t. There were babies and elders. We didn’t really talk much- we just got into it. First we learned simple chants, then harmonies, then riffs and parts. When we got off a rhythm, I asked people to stop, and re-orient, re-learn the line. Discipline is joyful. The music then soared, we clapped when we sang a line and it worked. Even in newness, we can do hard things, accomplish tricky harmonies.
We made amazingly rich, inventive sounds; some elders and young people wept on a bench together. A few babies slept right through it all, snug beneath our blanket of warm sound.
The best part of a community song circle is the songs you don’t expect, didn’t know at the start of the evening. Other people’s songs that catch you off guard and stay with you as you walk home. A movement chaplain taught a chant where the beat was spoken “there will be better days.”
[Simple to learn and harmonize- a mantra for these days that feel so hard to move through.]
Another person requested a collective scream; the collective catharsis was profound. Someone plucked union songs on a steel guitar.
At the end of the night people hugged, took warm baked goods home in pockets, wrote down their names on a sign up sheet. The weaving continues, deepens, as more of us are woven together. And the next morning I received several versions of this text from friends: “I need that to happen again. I will pay the rental or will bring the materials to make it happen. I, we need that.” This is what happens in good collective work: people find what part they love, a way to help. Embrace their niche, hold their note, move towards each other.
We come alive with care and brilliance when we can let go of the pressure of being a soloist and find richness in the harmony.
We have song circles scheduled for the next many months now. If you’re local come join us— will be listed on the events page here. And wherever you are: I made a list here of simple songs to teach in groups that keep spirits up— feel free to use it. If you know one I should add, let me know.
Who we are is our relations, what we do together is our practice. The way through is harmony. I do not pretend it will be simple or easy. I believe we will be singing through real danger and real harm. We cannot sing the danger away. But I do know singing has sustained people in struggle for generations, buoys whales and birds while migrating. Singing allows us to go on, to remember what matters. Singing weaves relations, heals loneliness, makes meaning. Together we will sing a song, a song that makes life worth living.
p.s. I’d love to hear from y’all, whether you write me or comment here, what songs are you singing lately to buoy her heart? And with whom are you singing?