Everything is Prayer

Writing, speaking your truth is a trust practice - and the world needs it.

Stating the obvious here, but writing on the internet is a trust practice. Am I ok being more seen, having my thoughts more publicly available to be dissected and judged? Am I ok being more dimensional than my “professional” persona and my playful & often regurgitatory social media accounts, instead grappling through my confusions, hopes & fears with only my own words as tools? We’ll see.

One of the most powerful lessons from working on abortion access is deciding how public to be with the work at hand. When we started Plan C in 2015, people told us it should be an “underground” organization, i.e. quietly seeding information across the US while making it impossible to determine who was behind it or how it was structured. We did the opposite, getting loud and being visible, out of a firm belief that this was public health information and people deserved to know it. We weren’t even making scientific discoveries or launching new services: we were finding things that already existed on the internet, researching and testing them, and publishing the results.

Politicians and the public have been tied up about abortion for decades, suspended in a tangled web between different anchor points of belief: some resting on the moral conviction of how they interpret Christianity’s sanctity of new life, protected at any cost; others on pro-natalist ideas of how high birth rates benefit society; and still others having recognized the power they can yield by controlling abortion, to keep people in fear/confusion/pregnancy and corral voters who think that’s the way.

And if there was something that could sidestep all of this other-peoples-entanglement, wouldn’t that be powerful? There was — you could get abortion pills in the mail — and this is what we shared loudly, under a right to free speech as well as the right to bodily autonomy and self-care in the form of the rights to privacy, liberty, the pursuit of happiness…. promises of this country, not always fulfilled but still the agreement. Since part of the charge was to de-stigmatize the act of abortion and bring it into the light after it had been shamed, criminalized and pushed under the rug by people on all sides, getting loud also meant calling the bully’s bluff: there was another way forward, and it didn’t require all these doctors and politicians to grant permission — permission was now largely up to the individual.

Side note, this isn’t a blog all about abortion — but it’s helpful to write about it, and I hope it can be a microcosm of some of the contradiction and complexity each of us is holding. Right now abortion access is my issue of choice because it’s a largely unresolved one, affecting vast swaths of the population and, in some ways, ultimately un-solveable. Meaning, no one’s ever going to come from on high and tell us it’s one way or another — we have to decide for ourselves and make our own meaning. For me, being childless by choice was a clear and deeply spiritual decision, directly connected to my purpose and my path and reflective of how I might be in right relation with myself, my communities and the planet. Everyone’s path is different, and on this matter I prefer to trust individuals to know it better than some priest or politician.

But, times have changed: the christian republican extremists are in charge, and even our free speech rights are being challenged. The question is, how loud will activists get? Will it depend on their issue, their identity, their level of exhaustion? Will our free speech right to question the government change in relation to how many people exercise it, with safety in numbers: the less people who speak up, the bigger the threat? I think that’s a reason to keep verbalizing the more beautiful world we’re trying to build — at odds more than ever with the administration that’s in place to govern us.

This morning in the gym, as I pushed through rounds of sit-ups with a burning satisfaction, I was hit with a thought: Everything is Prayer. This next sit-up is a prayer: for a stronger back, a flatter tum, better posture, not now but soon. My activist work has always been a prayer: a message, a series of actions toward a vision of a world that could be, a world with better outcomes for people stuck in that web of political consequences, people with their own prayers and intuitions and spiritual guides, people who know what’s best for them. My prayer is for those individuals to have more agency in determining what comes next.

My work is a prayer of protection for the ritual of abortion, not just a health matter but an ancient practice, one that is just as spiritually-led as the ritual of pregnancy or childbirth. My words and my actions are prayers for a more liberated future where a limited religious worldview doesn’t . Each act of sharing resources online, making art, starting a conversation with a stranger is a prayer. This means every email, every text is also a tiny prayer, all whisperings of the more liberated, more beautiful future I know in my heart is possible.

When I ground myself here, this feeling of knowing that my life IS its own ritual, my actions and words are prayers, my movement and my evolution are the unfolding of those prayers—then any decisions I have to make about how I show up in the world become pretty clear. Am I becoming more radicalized in my own corner of the tangled web, in my own extreme beliefs? Maybe. But how else are we meant to live except by making our own meaning?

I trust these words were meant to be shared here and now, and I hope they inspire recognition of your own prayers. Here’s a pair of tunes I wrote and released in 2020, calling them Prayer for a New World.