What to do. Post, protest, pray?
A longer read into how I’m responding to this question.
Nearly two months ago I shared with you that I would be taking a break from the online world. Everything I wrote then still stands true, I feel overwhelmed and confused by the online space and constantly in the question – is this useful? And yet, as if I didn't think my heart could break any more witnessing the genocide in Palestine, it somehow has and in this breaking, it doesn't feel true to be quiet. It also doesn't feel true (for me) in this moment to be in the fast lane, posting and re-posting, reacting rather than responding.
So this letter is my attempt to respond differently - slowly, with consideration and more in line with what feels honest in my body. My grief tending work has always been in service to collective liberation, and this feels like my way of showing up right now. I hope this writing serves you. If it doesn't, I hope you find the people and spaces that do. As Rumi said – there are a thousand ways to kiss the ground.
A few weeks ago, on our grief tending training one of our guest teachers Camille Sapara Barton shared with us The Social Change Ecosystem Map. Although I’d seen it before, hearing it again through their lens shifted something in me. Something softer, stronger and more resolute. The map guides the reader through ten roles that are needed in service to equity, liberation, justice and solidarity. Yes some of those roles include the outward frontline responders, disrupters and builders. But hearing it again other roles reignited something in me – whispers of the storyteller, the guide, the healer, the caregiver, the weaver.
Last night in the heat of another doomsday news feed scroll I sent an SOS out to some of my dearest friends. What should we do, protest / post / pray. I’m not even sure what feels true or helpful. Can we just be alive in the messy world together for a moment. Do you have any insights from any of your teachers you can share with me? I’m struggling. I love you.
A flurry of messages returned.
It’s unbearable at the moment. But not more unbearable than it’s been for the last year. I think we just cannot become numb.
I’m so with you. How, with our incredible capacity for love has humanity ended up here? May we keep feeling. May we keep seeing.
Sharing does something because most people’s worlds are online. In the meantime, we can only pray and trust that our humanity only gets stronger in the face of such injustice, and that people continue to wake up.
And so I sit here reflecting on how I can keep feeling, keep seeing. How I can show up to you – this small but mighty community of grief tenders who’s hearts are called to be and breathe with the collapse. How I can pray, and share my practices of love so that we may walk more closely towards the light.
Right now, today, here are some simple, practical, actionable things you can do (UK centred):
Actions:
Donate to Gaza soup kitchen
Write to David Lammy
Action against hunger – write to your local MP
Stop arms to Israel - write to your local MP and sign the oxfam petition
Here are some accounts that I follow
And I particularly want to mention two of my dearest friends who inspire me to keep sharing on the outside what I’m feeling on the inside – Tracey and Jeya.
Okay, take a breath. Now let me share how I'm finding my way through these days, from doing into being. Both are needed.
Whenever I am at a loss for how to respond to the heartbreak of the world, I look to the poets and the elders. And these last two weeks we’ve lost two of the most beautiful ones.
Andrea Gibson, poet laureate of Colorado, spoken word artist, partner to poet and writer Megan Falley died on 14th July 2025. Andrea’s poetry has been one of my lifeline’s since I first found their words. They put into words the multitude and magnificence of having a human heart that breaks, over and over.
In these times, I call on their words…
“When nothing softens the grief, may the grief soften me”
“Let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t”
“Wear your heart on your sleeve and never grow out of that shirt”
"When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain, and you teach your sons and daughters there are sharks in the water but the only way to survive is to breathe deep and dive"
And then, sweethearts, just five days later, the world lost Joanna Macy - environmental activist, author and scholar of Buddhism and a deeply respected voice in movements for peace and justice. Her work addresses wide-ranging psychological and spiritual issues of our times including collective grief tending.
Many of my teachers studied and learned from her directly and so her wisdom and teachings are truly the backdrop of this path. Joanna’s transformational healing process called The Work That Reconnects follows a spiral sequence flowing through four stages beginning with gratitude, then, honouring our pain for the world, seeing with fresh eyes, and finally, going forth.
Her words sit on the page for our grief tending training and as I read them again today they carry new meaning and as she calls it - active hope…
“if the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
"The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe."
Thank you Joanna.
Thank you Andrea.
This is the path of a grief tender, to somehow on some days, find a way to keep the river of my grief flowing. To remove the boulders and the dams that keep my sorrow and outrage numb, stagnant, stuck. But to also somehow, keep the banks of my river strong, able to hold the magnitude of emotion flowing through.
I have found other ways recently to find a way through these days. To find a way of somehow keeping my heart open, but not overwhelmed.
One practice that I've returned to again and again is Elizabeth Gilbert's invitation to write myself a letter from Love. Recently as I've met a new layer of my own personal grief from my mother's suicide, I've found writing letters from Love to be a life line. I have similarly turned to this practice against the back drop of a genocide happening in front of our eyes, right now, many miles away but also to people same as you and I. In fact, Liz's most recent letter to us (the Lovlets that is) asks love this question:
Dear Love, what do we do when it feels like the world is crumbling?
You can read Liz’s full letter here, but just to share a snap shot of it…
Either the world is truly ending — in which case, why not choose to show up for the end of the world as the most loving and creative possible version of yourself, in order to help the most people and manifest the most beauty possible before it all crumbles? Why not?
Or the world is not ending — in which case, why not choose to show up for the continuing of the world as the most loving and creative possible version of yourself, in order to help the most number of people and manifest the most beauty possible for as long as the world thrives?
And finally beloveds, I have returned to a devoted, committed, daily practice of sitting, stilling, quietening and listening.
Had I not started meditating again this week, there is no way I would have been able to know that what I most needed to do today was write to you all slowly. I would have reacted and posted, and reposted, a roared. And don’t get me wrong, that energy is needed now, take a look at where we started, back at the ecosystem, the map, the roles necessary for social liberation. But my role right now is this. It’s slower, nuanced, uncertain perhaps. But I promise it’s authentic, real, true, welcoming and curious.
Of course, my heart is with the Jewish community at this time, including people in my own immediate family who have relatives in Israel. There is no place for antisemitism – it hurts that I even need to clarify this. And yet, I never thought it was possible for the evidence coming out of Gaza to get more horrific week by week. It is inhumane, a war crime, a genocide. Gaza is being starved. The time is now. Although really the time was many, many months ago.
May you find a way to act, grieve, pray, love and continually reach towards life and active hope.
I hope this letter has served you in some way, please feel free to pass it on.
In love, prayer and unity,
Nici Moon
When The Bough Breaks
by Andrea Gibson
It’s two a.m.
The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
with eyes paid to care
and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there.
I say, “I see people
how the hell am I supposed to know
if they’re really there or not?”
He doesn’t laugh
neither do I.
The math’s not on my side
ten stitches and one lie.
I swear I wasn’t trying to die.
I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside.
Fast forward one year.
I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone
reading a poem to four hundred latino high school kids
who live with the breath of the INS
crawling up their mother’s backbones
and I am frantically hiding my scars
‘cause the last thing I want these kids to know
is that I ever thought that my life was too hard.
I’ve never seen a bomb drop.
I’ve never felt hunger.
I’ve also never seen lightning strike
but we’ve all heard thunder
and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning.
The smoke rises between us,
forming walls so high
they split the sky like slit wrists
and then the stars fall like blood.
We’re all left with nothing, but a death wish.
He said, “call me by my true name
I am the child in uganda all skin and bone”
Do you remember the rest?
how about this one, America
Jesus wept.
America, Jesus wept
but look at your eyes
dry as the desert sand
dusting the edges of your soldier’s wedding bands.
Look at your soul playing dead
because your ribcage is abu ghraib
is san quintin
is guantanamo bay
and your heart had beaten them so many times
they bleed the moon.
Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove that they are still free?
Can you imagine how that string must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of our missile heads
You can count the dead by the colours in the sky
The bough is breaking.
The cradle is falling.
Right now a six-year old girl is crutched in a ditch in Lebanon
wishing on falling bombs.
Right now our government is recording the test scores of black and Latino 4th graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2021.
Right now there’s a man on the street outside that door
with outstretched hands full of heart beats no one can hear.
He has cheeks like torn sheet music,
Every tear a broken crescendo falling on closed ears.
At his side there’s a girl with eyes like an anthem
that no one stands up for.
Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there.
It’s that we ignore the ones who are.
Till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into emergency rooms at three a.m.
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain
because we are bleeding from the outside in.
Skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction do not pick and choose who they kill.
Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Baghdad,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border
with the thousands of US school kids
bleeding through budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?
Thank god for denial.
Thank god we can afford the makeup
to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at all the smiling people
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart
and not a single star left to hold her
And the voices of a thousand broken nations saying
“wake me, wake me, when the American dream is over”
I needed to read this today, darling Nici. Thank you for sharing your words and your heart 🤍 and for sharing some tangible things to turn to when things feel hopeless x
These Beautiful words spoke to my heart.
And prompted me to take some more action, rather than sink back into the helplessness. x