Sara Sadek: 'Witnessing, action, and rest'

On awareness of the over 30,000 lives lost in Gaza over the past five months:

"The world is hemorrhaging sacred life. And just to name and honor that feels really important. It's OK that we're a mess, because we're watching something that is catastrophic. Also, I think for us to sustain any sort of activism for a long-term resistance movement, or to come together and do anything of substance, we have to be able to titrate between witnessing, action, and rest. Witnessing, action, and rest. And joy is an act of resilience. So is dance, so is song, so is coming together in community, so is sleep. We will burn out very quickly if all we are doing is witnessing."
— Sara Sadek, "How we radicalize ourselves with Sara Sadek": Counter-cultural motherhood, community building and our collective responsibility to meet this moment (and why we can all do our bit!). Fran Liberatore and Sara Sadek. A Life Unschooled. March 6, 2024.
(audio: 12:16–13:06)

Another thought:

“Walter Benjamin writes [in The Arcades Project] that every true waking is a reshaping of reality. He describes this waking as a technique: the reclamation of what is past, not as complete facts or truths but as a period of time that can be reshaped simply by making contact with the waker’s present. Benjamin’s interest is focused on sleeping and waking as collective acts. In this sense, revolution—or awakening—is to wake from a prolonged collective slumber, and Benjamin’s moment of waking is the moment in which memory is shaped anew, in which the group—the masses—gradually reclaims its self-awareness through political action and becomes capable of reformulating reality, of providing an explanation of the dream in which it was caught, and emerges from collective absence into a new reality.”
— Haytham El Wardany. “When Waking Begins.” Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. Excerpted from The Book of Sleep. Reprinted in the Paris Review. November 3, 2020.

We have to try:

"...one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."
— James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers," 1963