Kardia Kaiomenē: Not Normal

Peter NG leading us in song at our 10-Year Party.

It’s high time we who believe in a world beyond endless cycles of violence stop trying to play by the rules that are stacked against us anyway. It’s time we stop trying to be right, perfect, or even “good,” and instead do what is needed. It’s time we stop waiting for someone to come and save us, and instead send out our own signal. One that is unwavering. One that blatantly declares that we will not let each other face these incoming long, dark, and difficult times alone. One that makes the bold statement that we will do whatever it takes to keep the soul of ourselves and this world intact. – Chani Nicholas, excerpt from 01.22.25 Newsletter

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A few months ago, we celebrated with friends and former colleagues in Orange County to mark the ten-year anniversary of moving from Southern California to Southeast Michigan in August 2014. Our sister Kristen organized the event in my mom’s backyard. It was immaculate.

We raised a glass and ate tacos and shared a few stories. Members of our board testified from the mic. Our friend Peter flew down from Portland to celebrate and play popular tunes on his ukulele. We were bathing in beloved community.

Since our party, we’ve experienced a lot of heaviness. The election. The wildfires. The Nazi salute Inauguration. The flurry of fascist executive orders. The ongoing terrorizing of the occupied Palestinian territories. Honestly, it feels like things are spiraling out of control. It makes a lot of sense that despair, depression, denial and controlling behavior are seeping out all over the place.

At the end of 2024, my friend Deni and I were texting. Deni was one of my favorite principals at Capistrano Valley High School. In our thread, Deni lamented that, these days, many well-meaning Americans are feeling absolutely overwhelmed with everything that is going on. She asked this:

If you could advise one thing that everyone should do in the coming year to help the overall state of the U.S., what would it be?

I immediately thought back to the day before George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Detroit pastor Rev. Roslyn Bouier got on a zoom church service that Lindsay and I were facilitating from Bend, Oregon. We were in the middle of the lock-down portion of the covid-19 pandemic. Rev. Roz told a dozen of us that our goal should not be about getting back to normal. Because “normal is overrated.”

We live in a country that makes up 5% of the world’s population and takes up 25% of the world’s resources. It is a country that has the biggest military budget (by far) and the highest prison population on the planet, and it is funding and fully supporting a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

And yet, multitudes of people within our own country lack access to healthcare, housing, humanizing jobs, adequate and healthy food, and clean water.

The one thing that we can all do in the coming year is to stop normalizing a culture that makes up 5% of the world’s population and takes up 25% of the world’s resources. Genocide is not normal. Mass incarceration is not normal. Amazon same-day delivery is not normal. A healthcare system built on corporate profit is not normal. Factory Farms are not normal. Celebrity culture is not normal. None of this is normal.

And yet, our nephews and niece are growing up in a culture that normalizes all of this and so much more.

We are conned into normalizing these conditions and these conditions are destroying the lives of people – disproportionately black and brown - all over the planet. These normalized conditions are also atrophying our emotional and spiritual muscles which means that we are losing the capacity to feel, to access and to embody love, justice, compassion, humility and truth. When we refuse to break rank with normalized supremacy, greed and violence, everyone loses.

What if we all stopped pretending like any of this is normal and started dissenting in ways that are public? In conversations. On social media. With the children in our lives. Using whatever power and privilege we have at our disposal.

If this is what we commit to in 2025, we are going to need each other more than ever – because when we publicly break rank with normal, we will get serious pushback.

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In this moment, we are drawing on the wisdom and genius of Grace and Jimmy Boggs, two community organizers who lived in Detroit long before we arrived in 2014. For decades, Grace and Jimmy remained committed to what they called “two-sided transformation.” This is how Grace put it in a book she wrote about fifteen years ago:

We can transform the world

if we transform ourselves – and

we can transform ourselves

if we transform the world.

Jimmy and Grace Boggs believed that this two-sided transformation is rooted in millions of diverse and scattered partnerships and groups, most of them small and barely visible. These intimate incubators can cultivate in us the kind of spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage we need in order to break rank with what is “normal.”

Jimmy was a Black man born in the Jim Crow South who moved to Detroit to work in an auto factory for almost three decades. In the lead-up to this year’s election, we read a letter he wrote fifty days before the 1984 Presidential election that re-elected Ronald Reagan in a landslide. The letter that Jimmy wrote reads like he wrote it yesterday.

Jimmy Boggs wrote the letter to leaders who were committed to building a just and humane society. He summoned his friends and colleagues to chart a new and different course. He said he was issuing the call before the election – so that it would be clear that the need for a new movement was not dependent on the results of the election.

Jimmy Boggs called on fellow leaders to stop collaborating with the system. He said that when folks collaborate with a corrupt system, the corruption inevitably spreads from ruling elites to collaborators.

Jimmy Boggs said that America will never truly be great without a movement of people who challenge the system around every corner and who commit to getting healed from the spiritual malformation that inevitably comes from placing our faith and hope in some inherently corrupt corporate-sponsored messiah to come save us.

Jimmy Boggs said that this movement must work outside the electoral arena because once any movement allows itself to be incorporated into electoral politics, it cannot be resurrected. Jimmy witnessed what happened to the movement energy of the Black Freedom Struggle of the 50’s and 60’s. The corrupt two-party system co-opted it and used it in the service of corporate profit.

Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that would replace the every-four-years spectacle.

Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that is participatory and embodied - which is totally different than an electoral politics primed by the passive and disempowering nature of political identity and party affiliation.

Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that triggered the fault-lines of the system through mutual aid, collective study, boycotts, divestment and a disciplined commitment to a completely different way-of-life. With a few others.

Jimmy and Grace knew that the transformation of American society was not possible without a shift in consciousness, and a shift in consciousness was not possible without a critical mass, and a critical mass was not possible without creating critical connections.

Jimmy and Grace knew that a more compelling social paradigm was needed:

A shift from one-inch deep and

one-mile wide relationships

one-mile deep and

one-inch wide relationships.

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We see our work of soul accompaniment as being rooted in this kind of radical relationship building that is deep, meaningful, messy, intimate, inspirational, vulnerable and accountable.

As we move into Trumpster Fire 2.0, we will continue to live in the trenches of a two-sided transformation. We describe this work as strengthening souls at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation.

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Here are a few specific commitments (and offerings!) we'd love for you to consider taking us up on:

1. We will be committed to posting shorter pieces more frequently on this blog – to provide resources and opportunities that make two-sided transformation more tangible.

2. We will continue to make ourselves available for texts, emails, phone calls and zoom calls for this ministry of mutuality, as we process together what is happening in the world and in our souls.

3. We will be partnering with Christians for a Free Palestine to facilitate small groups during Lent to focus on what the American empire is doing to “the Holy Land"... and what we are being called to do in response.

4. We will be offering lectio divina circles on zoom - and in-person during trips back to Orange County.

5. We will be teaching workshops on “social justice and the bible.”

6. We would like to offer zoom calls to “communitize the news.” We are hearing from others who long for a spiritual and emotional holding space to make sense of the news together – we were never meant to metabolize so much terror, and promise of terror, on our own – nor to bury our heads in the sand and turn away. This is something Tom wrote about (but did not follow through on!) in the first week of the first Trump administration eight years ago. We are excited to make this vision a reality!

7. We are also thinking about leading up a half or full-day spiritual retreat in Southern California in 2025.

If any of this sounds like it meets a longing for you, please reach out.

Indeed, "it's time we stop waiting for someone to come and save us, and instead send out our own signal." We'd love for you to be part of signal-sending and amplifying with us in any of these one-mile-deep, inch-wide ways that may be calling to you.

We need each other. Now more than ever.