Episode 240
Valarie Kaur: See No Stranger
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Apple Podcastsby The Second City
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Oct 02, 2020
Episode 240 – Guest: Valarie Kaur
Guest: Valarie Kaur
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Kelly has a powerful conversation with civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, and faith leader Valarie Kaur. TRIGGER WARNING: this discussion includes discussion of racial slurs and sexual violence.
“I was given a gift that very few women who are mothers or are activists are ever given. I was given time off and a room of my own and I spent a year with my family in the rainforest. Breathing, really taking my first full deep breath that I had taken in a very long time and pouring through the stories of my life, pouring through social movements of the past, pouring through wisdom traditions looking for the answer. And I began to see these patterns that I started to call practices of revolutionary love; that our ancestors knew how to breathe, our ancestors knew how to push and it means grieving with each other and fighting for each other and raging with each other and reimagining with each other. And so I consolidated all this wisdom into this book. So really, Kelly, I wrote this book for my own survival.”
“Feelings come and go. Grief is the price of love, joy is the gift of love, rage is what we harness to protect that which we love. I mean, all of the emotions are part of the labor of caregiving. And so, what might it mean to extend that kind of love is labor beyond our own – beyond what evolution requires – to others, to our opponents, to ourselves who we too often neglect. That’s what I define as revolutionary love.”
“So, my book is filled with stories about how to do that when you’re sitting with a white supremacist, with a prison guard, or with a soldier, or with your former abuser. People you do not want to listen to. And yet, how do you stay and listen to the very end of their sentence? How do you be brave enough to be changed by what you might hear and still know that it is not granting them legitimacy, it’s granting them full humanity and it’s preserving your own humanity. That’s what revolutionary love is: it’s rooted in this act of radical wondering and deep listening, which I didn’t realize improv was teaching all this time.”