By Katherine Elmer

The world is on fire. Or… the world has been on fire for millennia and some of us have had the privilege to ignore the smoke. In these times of widespread suffering and awakening, I am grateful to be in community with so many souls answering calls to action and activism on behalf of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) lives and mother earth. As a child of “back to the land hippies” in rural Vermont (aka N’Dakinna or unceded Abenaki territory), I was introduced to activism through my parents’ lens of the 1960s (radical protesting in the streets) and Bread and Puppet theater a few towns over. As my world view has evolved, I’ve come to understand that this mainstream image of activism is out of balance.

By Katherine Elmer

I am a cis gendered, able-bodied, demisexual, white woman of European* descent. I grew up in situational poverty with parents who had college degrees and a middle-class upbringing. I identify as a “seer” and “truth teller”. A medicine woman not only for a body but for our culture that is in the throes of a transition, a rebirth. Resistance creates suffering; surrender engenders deep learning and healing- often laced with some discomfort as we grow into new ways of being in the world. But how do I “see” and speak “truth” in these spaces I inhabit that are, by design, hiding the truth from me and resisting the truth on my lips and heart?