Valarie Kaur Quotes

You don't need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.

In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian supremacy, one an extension of the other. Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.

Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear.

You are a part of me I do not yet know

Love” is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

I was beginning to learn that home is the space within us and between us where we feel safe—and brave. It is not a physical space as much as it is a field of being.

The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference. Love engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. We cannot access the depth of loving ourselves or others without our rage.

When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.

When suffering constricts the heart, awe stretches it back out, making us more compassionate, more loving, more present.

When we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.

Love is more than a rush of feeling. Love is sweet labor—fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving. A choice we make over and over again.

Every unjust social institution in history seemed permanent until it was imagined otherwise.

the purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding.

True understanding is not possible unless we risk changing our worldview. Otherwise we think we have built bridges to one another, but the bridges are rooted in sands that can shift with the tide.

Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace. Sometimes right relationship means reentering each other’s lives. Sometimes it means staying apart.

Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person's story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person's view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it's okay if I don't feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, 'One trains one's imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?

When we leave people alone with their pain, their alienation becomes the precondition for radicalization.

Unresolved grief inside a person is tragic; unresolved grief inside a nation is catastrophic.

Our lives are long and our circles are small. We remain linked to the ones we have loved, if only in our minds.

We can choose to remember that the goal of listening is not to feel empathy for our opponents, or validate their ideas, or even change their mind in the moment. Our goal is to understand them.

Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.

Can you choose one person to practice wondering about? Can you listen to the story they have to tell? If your fists tighten, or your heart beats fast, or if shame rises to your face, it’s okay. Breathe through it. Trust that you can. The heart is a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it becomes.

Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being. We birth the beloved community by becoming the beloved community.

No one should be asked to feel empathy or compassion for their oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.

Our lives are long and our circles are small. We remain linked to the ones have loved, if only in our minds. The question is how to be in right relationship with them, even if we may never agree with each other, or even see each other again. Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace.

When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does the same, we attribute it to essence - Oh, that’s just how they are. We think of us as complex and multidimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one-dimensional … In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.

I think the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive. —James Baldwin

Today I remember all that is beautiful and good and worth fighting for. Today I remember that the labor for justice has gone on for centuries before me and will go on for centuries after me. Today I remember that I am not alone - that if millions of women are listening to the wisdom within them too, and still choose to return to the work, then we will usher in a new era - where women are believed, where women lead.

I thought of all of us who have been trained to suppress our rage—women, especially women of color. Rage is a healthy, normal, and necessary response to trauma. It is a rightful response to the social traumas of patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty. But we live in a culture that punishes us when we show our teeth—we are called hysterical when we raise our voice; we are less likely to be believed when we tell our story with fury; and, if we are anything other than deferential with an officer, we might get hurt or shot, and even then, our deference might not make a difference.

America needs to reconcile with itself and do the work of apology: To say to indigenous, black, and brown people, we take full ownership for what we did. To say, we owe you everything. To say, we see how harm runs through generations. To say, we own this legacy and will not harm you again. To promise the non-repetition of harm would require nothing less than transitioning the nation as a whole. It would mean retiring the old narrative about who we are—a city on a hill—and embracing a new narrative of an America longing to be born, a nation whose promise lies in the future, a nation we can only realize by doing the labor: reckoning with the past, reconciling with ourselves, restructuring our institutions, and letting those who have been most harmed be the ones to lead us through the transition.

Love made him see with new eyes: Everyone around him was a part of him that he did not yet know.

Love is not an exchange economy.

On the other side of rage awaits the ability to wonder again at the spinning world.

As long as I compared my suffering with others’, I could not access compassion for myself, only more shame.

There is no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded.

Grief does not come in clean stages: It is more like the current of a river, sweeping us into new emotional terrain, twisting and turning unexpectedly.

Think of today as an entire lifetime," Wise Woman says to me before I fall asleep. "What was the hardest part in this lifetime? Notice where you sense that hardship in your body. How did you get through it?" We somehow managed to make it to the end of this day, the end of this lifetime. "What was the most joyful part of this lifetime?" Every day and every lifetime, no matter how hard, contains moments of joy. Notice what made it joyful. Sense what feels like joy in your body." "What are you most grateful for in this lifetime? Every day and every lifetime offers a new reason for gratitude. Sense that gratitude in your body." "Now, are you ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to think of the work you have done today and know that it was enough? Are you ready to behold everyone and everything you have ever known and loved, kiss them, and let them go? Are you ready to die a kind of death?" Each night, I die a kind of death. Each morning, I wake to the gift of a new lifetime. In between, I labor in love. It is enough.

The aim of divine rage is not vengeance but to reorder the world. It is precise and purposeful, like the focused fury projected into the world from the forehead of the goddess. It points us to the humanity of even those who we are fighting.

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.

Shallow solidarity was based on the logic of exchange -- You show up for me, and I will show up for you. But deep solidarity was rooted in recognition -- I show up for you, because I see you as part of me. Your liberation is bound up in my own.

I realized what was stopping me: an inflated sense of self-importance. I was acting as though things would fall apart without me, that others could not do the work as well as I could. But, really, I was just terrified that I would no longer have worth if I shifted from doing to being. I had grown so accustomed to the breathlessness of crises that paying attention to my own breath in my body was the new frightening thing. It was time to find the bravery to surrender my ego and equip others to lead.

My mind had turned them into monsters—bad guys with infinite power over me. But there is no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded. These men had hurt me out of their own suffering. It was common, it was banal. When we cannot see that evil is driven by a person’s wounds, not their innate nature, we become terrified of each other. But the moment we see their wounds, they no longer have absolute power over us. I could not see the wound in them until I tended to the wound inside me. And that required me to access my rage.

ancestral solidarity.” People of color survived oppression throughout our history through acts of solidarity. Shallow solidarity was based on the logic of exchange—You show up for me, and I will show up for you. But deep solidarity was rooted in recognition—I show up for you, because I see you as part of me. Your liberation is bound up in my own.

But the purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding. True understanding is not possible unless we risk changing our worldview. Otherwise we think we have built bridges to one another, but the bridges are rooted in sands that can shift with the tide. Solidarity is only possible if we are brave enough to reckon with the past and how the past shapes the present. In the United States, this means confronting the reality of white supremacy.

Revolutionary love” is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political and rooted in joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

White supremacy as an ideology had been pushed to the margins of American culture. But white supremacy as a system of structural advantage that favors white people persists: It animates the institutions we operate in. It is why our nation’s policies on immigration, criminal justice, and national security continue to criminalize communities of color, maintaining the climate in which hate crimes keep happening. We keep talking about hate crimes as radical acts driven by individual intention. But they are only the most visible evidence of this broader system at work.

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say - as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

But what is particular to America is that many who suffered enormous loss and destruction have had to do so alone, had to marshal language to tell the story, only to find that there was no one to hear it because their suffering contradicts the story that the nation keeps telling itself—the story of American exceptionalism. America is a beacon of light, the singular enforcer of truth. Our story of exceptionalism doesn’t allow us to confront our past with open eyes. A nation that cannot see its own past cannot see the suffering it has caused, suffering that persists into the present.

Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as a part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies by the state and sometimes by bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in forms that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories.

Anger is loaded with information and energy,” says Audre Lorde. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Lorde asks us to tend to the rage within us as a symphony, “to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.” It is a rhythm: Step away to rage, return to listen, and reimagine the solutions together. It becomes a kind of dance—to release raw rage in a safe container, in order to send divine rage into the world, like focused fury. The way of the warrior-sage is not only loving-kindness but loving-revolution, or revolutionary love.

We can have all the empathy in the world for a group of people and still participate in the structures and systems that oppress them.

I’m afraid for my children,” she said. “We came for security, but what kind of security do we have here?” Her neighbor had brought her American flags after her son was yelled at on the road. “For protection,” she had said. The flag was on the back of Swaran’s car when she was attacked. She shrugged. “I guess it didn’t work.

BOOKS THAT GREATLY INSPIRED ME AND THAT YOU SHOULD CONSIDER READING (in no particular order) Beyond the Culture of Contest by Michael Karlberg A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt The Family Virtues Guide by Linda Kavelin Popov, Dan Popov, and John Kavelin The Second Mountain by David Brooks High Conflict by Amanda Ripley The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein The Story of Our Time by Robert Atkinson Global Unitive Healing by Dr. Elena Mustakova What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck How Should We Live? by Roman Krznaric The God Equation by Michio Kaku Einstein’s God by Krista Tippett What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur Plays Well with Others by Eric Barker Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Bashō The Soul’s Code by James Hillman The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller, PhD The Hidden Words by Baha’u’llah

Forgiveness is for you, not for the person who hurt you,” she said. “For you, not them. For you.

he said. “Um.” I stopped and looked at him. “Well, I had to look for you and then I found you.” “How you found me?” Kavi asked with the same gentle inflection. “Well, we moved across the country and went all the way to the star nursery,” I said. “How you found me?” he asked again. “Appa and I found you together,” I said. Only then was he satisfied. Falling asleep that night, Kavi put his hand on my cheek. “This is the Mommy I wanted,” he said. I don’t know how love works beyond life and death. Some moments strike in me such wonder that I let myself fall into the glassblower’s breath.

I saw a boy sitting and dangling his legs, his back to me. I threw my arms around the boy’s shoulders. I thought it was Sharat but his shoulders were tiny. I leaned down to see who it was. A little boy in a red jumper smiled at me, and I was overcome with a love so intense that it enveloped both of us. I had never experienced such bright intensity before. “Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew he was my son. I had always wanted a daughter. Yet here he was. The boy saw that I was afraid. He transformed into a forty-year-old man before my eyes and smiled at me. I looked into his aged face and felt the same radiant love. He was showing me that it would be okay. He returned to his child self. I savored being with him. I wanted never to leave him. When he began to disappear, every fiber in me cried out: No! “You have to find me,” I heard him say. “You have to find me.” And he was gone. My eyes opened. It was unlike any dream I had had. I did not know whether it was my subconscious easing my fear of having a son, or a visit from another realm, or both. I just wanted to return to him. Seven years later, Kavi came into the world. I stopped thinking about the dream. One night, when Kavi was three years old, I was busy wrestling him into his pajamas on the bed. Suddenly he stopped his squirming and babbling and looked at me. “How you found me?

Joy is the gift of love: It makes the labor an end in itself. I believe laboring in joy is the meaning of life. May we look up at that night sky. May we let joy in. For we will be someone’s ancestors one day. If we do this right, they will inherit not our fear but bravery born of joy.

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images.

Stories that expand the collective we have the power to return us to one another.

Grieving together, we ease each other’s suffering and come to know each other.

We evolve our pursuit of justice from retribution - an eye for an eye - to collective liberation.

The voices we spend the most time listening to, in the world and inside our own minds, shape the way we see, how we feel, and what we do.

Joy returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for. In joy, we see even darkness with new eyes.

Each night, I die a kind of death. Each morning, I wake to the gift of a new lifetime. In between, I labor in love. It is enough.

I believe laboring in joy is the meaning of life.

Wonder is the wellspring for love

I watched as America's police departments became increasingly militarized armed with surplus military equipment and weapons from the war on terror. Police officers rolled down city streets in assault vehicles decked in full battle uniforms and assault rifles and I was no longer able to see their faces. When we can no longer see the faces of the people sworn to protect us, Public safety is an illusion.

The most consistent and immediate targets for gate were Sikh Americans -- the only people in the United States who wear turbans not as optional cultural garb but as part of our faith, an extension of our bodies.

She had hoped that it would be different for our generation, here in America. But patriarchy and gender oppression are not local anomalies. There is no nation, no community, and no corner of the earth where women and girls are as safe as men.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory," said historian Howard Zinn.

Now you think I won't know you From the clouds that surround you But you exalt everything That cannot contain you -- I'll know you by your joy" -Brynn Saito

The European colonizers who arrived on this soil assumed that dark bodies could not contain the inner life they experienced in themselves. Once they no longer saw the faces in from of them as equal, they could call people strangers on their own land, savage to the touch, ripe for conversion: They could concentrate them, enslave them, pillage them, consolidate their resources, and build an empire on their soil in the name of God and country.

Imagine institutions on this soil built on the premise of equality rather than white supremacy. Imagine the forms of community that might have emerged, and how that would have evolved through generations. What would my childhood have been then? I reach the limits of my imagination. The dream evaporates. What does it take to reclaim wonder now after so much trauma and devastation?

Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity -- and preserves our own.

I do not owe my opponents affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.

It was and is not a fringe belief. White supremacy is a system based on the notion that white Christians are superior and therefore deserve economic, political, and cultural dominion on this soil. This single powerful idea motivated the rape, pillage, conquest, concentration, incarceration, and slaughter of indigenous, black and brown peoples throughout U.S. history. White supremacy forced an ordering of human value.

All of us assume that we are good people. When we set aside the labels "good" and "bad," we can begin to wonder about our effect on the world, which of our actions create the world we want, and which destroy it.

The less I hate, the more I am free to choose actions that are controlled not by animosity but by wisdom. Laboring to love my opponents is how I love myself. This is not the stuff saintliness. This is our birthright.

Documentation determined which atrocities were remembered and which were forgotten, whose lives were deemed grievable and whose disposable, and whether the rest of the world intervened.

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth.

Love is dangerous business, Papa Ji explained. If you choose to see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you. You must even protect them when they are in harm's way.

Maybe moving through this world, in your body, is enough to make you feel constriction in your chest. Maybe you're holding someone close to you who is struggling and suffering. Maybe you are reeling from the latest mass shooting, or the refugee crisis at the border, or the looming threat of climate change, or the blistering pain of the global pandemic. Maybe, like me, you are breathless from all of the above. I thought my breathlessness was a sign of my weakness, until a wise friend told me what I wish to tell you: Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what's happening right now: The world is in transition.

Now you think I won't know you From the clouds that surround you But you exalt everything That cannot contain you -- I'll know you by your joy." - Brynn Saito

Stories that divide the world into us and them have the singular power to disconnect us. But stories that expand the collective we have the power to return us to one another.

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit... It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say: Tat tvam asi, 'I am that.' It is the African philosophy: Ubantu, 'I am because you are.' It is the Mayan precept: In La'Kech, 'You are my other me.

Today Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by a white right-wing extremist than a terrorist who kills in the name of Islam.

We needed to do more than resist. We needed to reimagine the world.

was a little girl in two long braids who liked writing poetry and riding on tractors, but my grandfather saw me as a warrior.

who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.

Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.

Seeing no stranger is an act of will.

Any act to change the world around us begins within us. It starts with a sense of agency, a sense that we have the power to effect change.

and then it happened. I heard the suffering inside their hate: their sense of violation since 9/11, their anxiety about keeping their jobs, their terror as a nation where white people like them had economic and cultural control seemed to disappear, their relief upon the rise of political figures who validated their hate. These men inhabited a world filled not with people but with subhumans who threatened them. What a painful way to live.

You can’t lead people you don’t love,” says Van Jones, a lifelong activist and innovator who models

Wondering about others helps us to wonder about ourselves.

The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference.

But suppressed anger always finds a way to explode. For women and girls, it is more likely to explode internally as self-hatred or stress or illness. For men and boys, it is more likely to erupt as violence against others.

How do we make peace with beloved ones who become ghosts? The secret is to understand that our relationship with them has not ended even though they are gone. If haunting is possible in death, then healing is possible, too. The dance is endless: The circle of listening goes on even after death when their voice becomes internal to us. The moment I get quiet enough to listen, I can hear my grandfather’s voice humming inside me, and I can feel his love, the sweet labor that nourished me through childhood and sustained us even through the years when we could not understand each other, the love that returned us to each other on his deathbed and is returning me to him even now—love that outlasts life.

The future is dark,” I said. “But what if—what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb?