Best known for her groundbreaking play The Vagina Monologues, and as a founder of V-Day, a movement to call attention to violence against women, Eve Ensler reveals her harrowing struggle with uterine cancer and explores how the ordeal allowed her to reclaim her own body in her intensely personal new memoir, In the Body of the World. We reached her in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she has been working to raise awareness about the use of sexual violence as an act of terrorism and war.
In today’s social movements, there is typically online organizing (“Click here to do this good thing”) and there is offline organizing (“Excuse me, ma’am, would you sign this petition to do this good thing?”). But hold on to your clipboards because I’ve seen the future. And I am here to tell you that a new wave of community organizing is dawning at a bar, dog park, spa, cupcake shop, playground, and yoga studio near you. Let’s call it “Deep Offline Organizing.”
For the biologist and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber, love conquers all—maybe even energy companies with deep pockets.
Ai-jen Poo is an organizer. Not the kind that disposes of your clutter or rearranges closets: a community organizer, bringing people with common interests together so they can work as a group to improve their lives. She organizes domestic workers, the mostly female workforce that cares for our families and our homes.
Traveling through West Virginia, Michael Hendryx passes through two worlds. One has forested hills, trees cresting up and over the mountains, the hum of endless streams lending the setting an organic soundtrack. It’s almost heaven. The other world is the opposite.
We’re still in that time of year when we challenge ourselves to create new and healthier habits. The newspapers are full of specials for gym memberships and packages of yoga classes. Many of my friends have resolved to work out for 45 minutes a day, or meditate for 15 minutes a day, in the efforts to retrain their brain chemistry and lock in a new pattern of being.
If you’ve found your way to this blog, the chances are that you might consider yourself an activist. If that’s the case, chances also are that you or someone you love has had issues with balance. Perhaps you or that special someone has even made a recent New Year’s resolution about the topic? You know what I’m talking about; it’s what others often call ‘"life/work balance," but for us, it doesn’t divide up quite so neatly. Those of us who call ourselves activists often see our work as a vocation, a way of life.
When people ask me why I do the work I do, the answer is easy. I do it because I deeply love the people I have the honor of collaborating with. For me, environmental and social justice activism isn’t just a job or a vocation, it is a golden ticket into a beloved community. It seems that those who devote their lives to the betterment of one another and the planet are a special kind of family, building a kinship unparalleled in other workplaces. And it is those community bonds that have kept me doing the work, even in the hardest of times.
We have no idea what will befall us in the future, but we can commit to paying attention to how we show up to meet whatever happens next.
Recently I met someone who reminded me about what really matters, someone who inspired a perspective that remade my world anew. And for that reason, I’m so glad I can say yes to the question that is all the buzz across Texas: "Have You Seen Leon?"
