making space

Notes from nonviolence class and a Jupiter in Gemini ritual

Dearly Beloved Enchantable Readers,

As I write this morning, the waning fullish moon is making its way across the sky, hills cloaked in fog on this rainy season morning. Creatures make strange sounds outside.

It is good to be alive.

I am teaching my class on strategic nonviolent resistance (more on that title below), or just nonviolence, or just love-in-action. It has been a potent and powerful class, I think I can say for all of us.

On Friday, I made a slip and said to the students, “This class I am taking is moving through me in unexpected ways.”

This class I am taking.

But it wasn’t a slip - it was the truth, for I am taking it along with them, alongside them. We are taking it together as we teach and learn in beloved community.

I am constantly blown away by what happens when you just make space. Make space for complexity. Make space for not knowing. Make space for unanswerable questions. Make space for the messy. Make space to show up fully as ourselves, in all our complexity and messiness. Make space for each other.

In this class, we have been making space.
So much of what I do is just making space.

In this class, they have been teaching through presenting case studies of “nonviolent” movements - nonviolent in quotes, because we are looking deeply at nonviolence as non-binary, nonviolence as a spectrum, and there is never a pure nonviolence. Some of the movements we have looked at, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, the Black Panthers, and Gulabi Gang in India, have used, or maintain the right to use, some element of violence. We are not excluding this. We are looking closely at why oppressed and marginalized groups use violence (and their right to respond to oppression and violence), and how often the story gets spun by the media to highlight the violence when it is actually a very small element of what these groups do or stand for. As Stellen Vinthagen and Sean Chabot ask in their 2015 article on decolonizing civil resistance, what do we miss when we exclude these movements from our study and understanding?

Each case study has been powerful. I wrote a few weeks ago about how I hope this class moves us, and I am moved, deeply. I have learned so much through their questions and curiosity and what they have brought to our learning circle. And we still have a week left together.

Creating a truly collaborative space involves choice - for everyone. Students choose the movements we study - I have a list, but they can add to it, and they have chosen ones that I wouldn’t have thought to add and our class has been so much more interesting for it. When students get to choose what they learn, they knock these assignments out of the park, go above and beyond, shine bright. Each case study has been a true gift to the learning community, so much depth and heart and soul and substance in them. They have brought so much of themselves into these facilitations, which have been informative and creative.

We take a humble approach of learning from and with these movements. We hold their complexity and try to offer both reverence and criticality. Our critique is with humility, knowing that if we were in the same position, we might not be able to do better. That it’s easier to see from afar and outside. We orient ourselves toward honoring these movements and what they accomplished, knowing that often the effects are so far beyond what we can easily see and might not be felt until long into the future.

When we stand up, we make space for others to do so.
When we stand up for ourselves, we are standing up for others going through the same struggle.
When we are vulnerable, we make space for others to share their vulnerability.
When we show up as authentically as we can, we make space for others to do the same.

I think the most radical things I do are the most simple.
The bell: stop, arrive. Slow down. Welcome.
The circle: share. Listen.
The altar: acknowledge. Honor. Remember.
Offering choice.
Offering space.

When we make space, magic can live there. Magic can grow there. Hearts can be shared. Tears can flow. And all of it is welcome.

---

The past three weeks have almost broken me multiple times, some reasons which I have shared here and others which I cannot write about publicly at this moment. But as I sit here this morning, dawn breaking, I feel incredibly powerful.

And it feels like it is coming through the class.

I have had to take stands and set boundaries the past few weeks which has been incredibly hard and exhausting, and, I feel so much more powerful for it.

The material we have been working with and the things we have been talking about and the authors we have been reading have given me the power to take these stands. Have given me courage to say a firm NO when needed.

In our class, we talk about how nonviolence is both a NO and a YES. It is both what we oppose, and what we yearn for. It is our opposition, our resistance, and it is our loving creation, our joy, our desire.

We talk about how nonviolence is a word translated from Sanskrit often as non-harming - which is true - but there is a deeper meaning, which I learned from my dear brother-mentor-friend Michael Nagler of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. It is nonviolence as the absence of the desire to harm, which is a whole different ballgame from non-harming. Think about it.

One of the challenges of the word of nonviolence is its negativity, its negation. Its constant relation to violence. The word in English doesn’t capture what it is, only what it is not. This is why it often defined as love-in-action, my preferred definition.

When you love someone or something, you care for them.
When you love someone or something, you also tell them to stop if they are doing something harmful.
When you love someone or something, that love-in-action can look like both resistance and creation.
It can look like boundaries.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” -Prentis Hemphill

The title of the class has always bothered me, because nonviolence is about more than strategic nonviolent resistance. Yes, nonviolence is resistance. But, if we spend our whole existence in resistance mode, it is exhausting. It is so tiring to be resisting, to be in the energy of against all the time.

And yes, sometimes it is necessary. For example, all of us need to be doing everything we can to resist these genocidal governments right now. There is an immediate pressing need for resistance. Lives depend on it. Our humanity depends on it.

But at the same time, we need a yes, we need a for. A friend asked me this week, “How do we not live in function of these systems?” And that is the question I will be living into this week. How do we live in a way beyond resistance, where we are focusing our energy towards what we want instead of what we don’t want? Can that, itself, be a form of resistance?

If nonviolence is the absence of a desire to harm, what is it the presence of a desire of? That question might feel clunky, but stay with me…

Nonviolence is the presence of a desire for/to….

It is the presence of a desire for all beings to be happy, healthy, peaceful, and free.
It is the presence of a desire for the conditions for all beings to thrive.
It is the presence of a desire for the flourishing of life in all forms.

What would you add to this list of desires?

---

One of the magical things we did in class last week was divination using my Beautiful Trouble card deck (Beautiful Trouble is a toolbox for revolution in book, website, training, and card form. I recommend all of them). For the first 8 days of class, I had been shuffling the cards and putting them on the altar every day. The cards feature different tactics, methodologies, stories, and principles about nonviolent social change. They are educational and informative. The toolbox comes with a list of about a dozen ways you can use the cards, but nothing felt quite right.

Then the morning of the full moon and Jupiter-Venus conjunction, it dawned on me: I should use the cards the way I always use cards. As a divination tool.

In class, I spread the cards out on the table. I asked students to think of a sticky situation, a question they were holding, a challenge or conflict in their life. Then I invited them to pull a card. Then they went into pairs to talk about it.

It was incredibly powerful. Many of them received clarity and affirmation. Some of them had very tangible results almost immediately after class. Those are their stories to share, not mine. But even I was utterly blown away by the magic of it all.

I pulled the instruction card, which was instructive! My students’ read on it was that I am the instructor, and I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and that the way I teach is important, so keep stretching myself in the ways I instruct.

And what I learned through this process is that when we conjure, when we open up a space for magic to flow through, we are opening a portal for it to flow through others. We are making magic in and for community, for the benefit of all.

Also importantly, we make meaning together. When we drew a card, we might have been puzzled, but sitting with a friend or two, they can offer a different perspective and together, we might find profound meaning.

Using these cards as a divination tool was a way of engaging with the material of the class and our lives in a transrational way, beyond linear rational thinking. It invited us to approach nonviolence and the big questions on our minds and hearts from a different angle, a different throughway, which to me is both re-enchanting education and a decolonial pedagogical praxis. Academia would have us only honor the linear and rational and intellectual, and this was an example of a way we can access other pathways of learning, which can expand our understanding and re-enchant and enrich our experience so much.

---

Mom

The magic I received on this day was mail from my mom. It was actually from my mom’s best friend Janice, who sent me some pictures she had of my mom when she was younger, from childhood. There are a few high school class photos and one of her and my uncle with my grandpa at the beach. They are sweet, sweet photos, and I never realized how much I look like my mom until I saw them.

Receiving this mail on a day when we conjured divination in the classroom, when we asked questions and went beyond our linear rational thinking to receive answers, was a transmission of the message that I am not alone in my current struggles, that I have support both of this earth and beyond it, in this realm and in the unseen. My communities are here, and I am receiving support in ways I cannot even fathom. I am not, am never, doing this work or going through these struggles alone. I am reminded to trust, to have faith that I am supported.

---

Speaking of magic and portals, this is a big moment, astrologically speaking. Jupiter has just made its transit from Taurus into Gemini. Jupiter is our celestial fairy godmother, and brings abundance, expansion, and blessings to whatever area of our lives they are touching.

I cannot encourage or urge you enough to make magic with Jupiter in Gemini. You don’t need to believe in astrology to do this. I don’t “believe” in astrology (I mean I do, but it’s not strictly a belief). I practice with it. I make magic with it. And it works.

Last year, when Jupiter moved from Aries into Taurus, it was the day we found the pedestal altar in the forest. For a year, we have been making offerings at this spot.

In my chart, Jupiter in Taurus is my 9th house (where my sun is as well) of teaching, learning, travel, adventures, and spirituality. Almost immediately after this transit last year, I received an invitation to go to the Congo. Then Colombia. I had so many opportunities to teach and travel this year. I expanded and grew so much in this area of my life, and I feel the abundant blessings that Jupiter brought to this part of me.

I know the magic of working with Jupiter, and I encourage you to join me in it :)

Here is how I am working with Jupiter moving into Gemini:

1. I re-read my love letter spell for Jupiter in Taurus, which sat on my altar all year. I burned it. I gave thanks for all the blessings and magic that came to fruition, and offered the ashes to the earth. (You could reflect on the past year, from last May until now, and if you know what house Taurus is in your birth chart¹, you can count the blessings that have occurred in this area of your life).

   

   Thank you, Jupiter in Taurus

2. I wrote a new love letter spell to Jupiter in Gemini based on where it lands in my chart. For me, this is my 10th house of career and public offerings. I asked for Jupiter’s support, expansion, and abundance in this area, getting as specific as possible (the universe loves specificity). I read it out loud while listening to Gustav Holst’s Jupiter² and placed it on my altar.

   

   Jupiter in Gemini spell in my bell

3. I will give thanks, again and again. I will pay it forward in every way I can. The universe loves it when you pay it forward, when you demonstrate your gratitude through resource flow and reciprocity. For example, I made a donation to Metta Center for their contribution to my class, and I bought flowers to celebrate the day.

4. I will take action. The universe also really loves it when you demonstrate that you are serious and committed. However small, I will take action towards the things I am asking for collaboration around.

There is one week of class left in the academic year. I am feeling both haggard and powerful. Mostly powerful, though. I feel the power of the communities I am a part of, the support of forces seen and unseen, and absolute clarity about my purpose.

Happy Sunday, dear readers! May the magic of Jupiter in Gemini bring abundance, expansion, and blessings that ripple through your lives and through all the lives you touch.

With love and care,

Stephanie

Me in one of my favorite spots on campus, feeling vibrant and loving the new glasses life :)

1. If you don’t know your chart, I recommend pulling it up on the Chani app or web site:

https://chart.chaninicholas.com/

2. Thank you, Sarah, for this recommendation! :)