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.

You are a part of me I do not yet know

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Love is not an exchange economy.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? —bell hooks

You are a part of me that I do not yet know.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

When listening gets hard, I focus on taking the next breath. I pay attention to sensations in my body: heat, clenching, and constriction. I feel the ground beneath my feet. Am I safe? If so, I stay and slow my breath again, quiet my mind, and release the pressure that pushes me to defend my position. I try to wonder about this person’s story and the possible wound in them. I think of an earnest question and try to stay curious long enough to be changed by what I hear.

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.

Everyone has a role in the labor of birthing a new America. If you find yourself in harm’s way right now, then it is not necessarily your role to listen to the people who are terrorizing you. Or to tend to any kind of wound in them. Your primary responsibility is to survive, find safety, and tend to the wounds they inflict on you—to build bonds with people who are willing to wonder about you, grieve with you, and fight with and for you. In finding ways to breathe, you are creating the kind of energy and joy that can sustain us all in the struggle. That is your act of revolutionary love.

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.

To break another's bones, to take their life, is to forgo wonder: It is to cut off a part of ourselves that we do not yet know. I choose nonviolence because it is moral and strategic.

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.

The norms and institutions that order this world are not inevitable but constructed - and therefore can be changed.

Rather than taming public expressions of moral outrage, perhaps it is up to the rest of us to train our ears to “hear beyond hearing,” in the words of theorist Judith Butler, so that we can discern the truth of the pain of injustice and confront our own complicity and responsibility.

The more I listen, the less I hate. The less I hate, the more I am free to choose actions that are controlled not by animosity but by wisdom.

His healing was a process of self-reconciliation, accepting the darkest parts of himself and integrating them into who he knew himself to be.

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

Everyone in this country says, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’ ” Papa Ji liked to say. “All talk! No action! That’s not love.” Love and labor were inseparable.

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.

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.

I had come to measure my sense of worth by how much I produced, how well I responded, and how quickly.

In the cold and snow of winter, there’s a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

My friend Professor Melissa Harris-Perry once told me that after Obama’s election, she held up a picture of President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to her class. “Which one is Obama?” she asked her students. The students shouted, “King! King!” “No,” she said. “Obama is President Johnson. Obama is constrained by the office of the presidency. President Johnson could not deliver civil rights victories without Dr. King. The president needs a King. The president needs Kings, plural. We must be his Kings.

In these moments, 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.

Pain that is not transformed is transferred,” says Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.

Papa Ji was like a great redwood tree,” Joyce said to me. “He was ancient and life-giving at the heart of the forest that is your life. The tree provided shade and you didn’t know how the forest could be without it. Then one day, the tree fell—there was a thunderous crash, and it threw up dirt and shook the entire forest. Every time you walk through the forest now, you stumble over the fallen tree and bloody your knees, over and over. You do not know how to move through the forest without crashing into it. In time, you will slowly learn to walk around the tree. And then one day, you will decide to sit on its great trunk and notice how moss is growing over it, and flowers now, and it is becoming part of the forest. You will learn to be still and take in the beauty and be in it. Then you will find him.

squad care”—a way to be in relationship with people committed to caring for one another: “Squad care reminds us there is no shame in reaching for each other and insists the imperative rests not with the individual, but with the community. Our job is to have each other’s back.

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.

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

There comes a point, in the aftermath of cruelty or injury, when I start to wonder about my opponent: Why did they do that? Say that? Believe that? Vote that way? What is at stake for them? What is driving their behavior? And I want to find out.

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.

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.

Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person’s humanity, even if they deny our own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.

We were dancing on election night. I felt energy in my body. I felt joy... Joy returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for. In joy, we see even darkness with new eyes. I was not alone. I was one in millions. I was part of a movement. One in a constellation. I had to shine my light in my specific slice of sky. I could do that. I did not know then all the crises yet to come, the rise of white nationalists who held this presidency as their great awakening, mass detentions and deportations, Muslim bans, zero tolerance policies separating migrant children from their parents, attacks on the rights of queer and trans people, assaults on women and women's rights, and new mass shootings and hate violence against Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, black people, Latinx people, indigenous people, and immigrants. All I knew was that the future was dark. And that as it got darker and more violent people would get tired, go numb, and retreat into whatever privilege they might have. I wanted to help people stay in the fire. I wanted to help myself stay in the fire. I concluded that revolutionary love was the call of our times and started building the tools to practice it.

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.

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

Every social justice movement in the United States has been infused with the energy of faith leaders who ignite our moral imagination and connect us with our ability to re-create the world around us. We do not need religion to imagine the world we want. But we do need more spaces to imagine and wisdom about how to do it. Prophetic teachers and faith leaders can offer sacred spaces for collective imagining, rituals for resilience, and stories and songs of ancestors that infuse our struggles with purpose. They can lift our gaze beyond immediate victories toward the world we are longing for, as Father Jim and Sister Mary Ellen did for us in that church basement. When we hold fast to a vision of the world as it ought to be, we can better discern which institutions can be reimagined, and which cannot.

We will not be free of Guantánamos until we reimagine a world in which the quarantine of bodies is no longer required to make us believe that we are safe.

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.

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 our own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.

When the mind is free, divinity flows naturally.