how to find our gifts.

an imperfect guide for meeting the moment.

I’ve been working on traditional gift guides for this holiday season and bookmarking and saving ideas for them have been a source of real comfort and, forgive me, joy, in the past week. As I’ve done for much of the past decade, I’ll be filling my guides with small goods from favorite artists and small businesses and I’m looking forward to showcasing folks whose products and ethics, and often both, do something to challenge the status quo, even if that is simply to make something beautiful by hand. But before I share gifts from the physical realm, I wanted to ease into the gift giving season with a less conventional gift guide that I hope will wend me and also you, toward the gifts that each of us has to lend to this particular moment on Earth.

First, a story:

I have been attempting to mend a hole in a sweater. The sweater—really a dress—was munched through in one small brooch-adjacent spot by a ravenous clothes moth. The resulting hole is quite noticeable and as tends to happen with holes in knitwear, it will certainly continue to unravel if I let it.

Allowing an entire dress of a sweater to become undone—especially one that was hand-knit by masters of their craft half a world away—isn’t something I’m willing to allow on my watch. So despite an utter lack of skill, I am trying to fix it. I’ve never mended a sweater by replicating the original knit before. I’ve felted small holes in wool sweaters, I’ve darned others with thread and a simple weave, and I’ve sewn more than my fair share of patches in busted-through pants, but this dress requires something slightly more skillful.

My first attempt at the fix was initially not so terrible, but something went wrong between picking up my crochet hook and closing the last gap. My second attempt was somehow worse than the first and my third was more disastrous than any. But even as my progress seemed to be working in reverse, it was clear to me that the path to repair was there. I would need to better understand how to follow the yarn and better determine where to plunge my blunt needle into the knit and where to send it up again, but even as I fumbled the task, I could see that it wouldn’t be impossible. Moreover, I was reminded—in part thanks to the half ton of YouTube videos I consumed on the subject and in part thanks to a friend who talked me down after my third attempt—that there are people who know how to do this. Fixing this sweater isn’t something I’ve succeeded in doing yet, but I’m no less certain now than when I began that it’s something I will eventually be able to do.

This brings me, naturally, to organizing against authoritarianism, which is, unraveling sweaters aside, the task we have at hand. There are folks who have been here before. There are organizers who have flexed these muscles more often than I have and perhaps you as well. There’s the whole history of the human race to turn to for both guidance and cautionary tales. The work for us, now and always, is to determine how we fit in. We need to understand what skills we already have and what we will need to learn and I’m here to tell you that our early attempts might be very messy indeed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way forward, that there isn’t a path, and that we won’t succeed.

Toward that end, here are pieces I’ve turned to this week that have been particularly helpful for me on this kind of gift guiding front:

+ Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a climate scientist and author of the new book, What If We Get it Right, has a helpful venn diagram framework that she uses to encourage folks to join in on climate action, but it’s applicable for finding our place in all kinds of social movements. Her piece this week is an excerpt from her book and it was as comforting as it was challenging. “Take a deep breath, find your role, roll up your sleeves, get tenacious.” Printing her venn diagram, or sketching it out and filling it in over drinks with a friend would not be wrong. Discussing it in a knitting circle where everyone learns how to fix their sweaters would be just right indeed.

+ A friend of mine shared this piece written by Daniel Hunter for Waging Non-Violence on the day after the election and true to its title it’s been one of the more grounding things I’ve read this past week. Hunter writes, “Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos.” I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to form friendships and organizing relationships with dozens of local women over the past year or so especially, and I know I’d be feeling far worse at this particular juncture without them. So, here’s a plea to find your people. For me that’s meant saying yes to the invitation to join a Whatsapp group even when I felt allergic to it, to drafting the email even when I had other work to do, to showing up with a plateful of brownies even when I’ve been extremely tempted to stay in bed.

+ Also from Waging Non-Violence, is this piece from Maria J. Stephan. “Successful movements organize campaigns based on realistic yet audacious assessments of what is possible.” My mending a sweater? A realistic yet audacious assessment of what is possible. May I find a way to apply that same energy toward our collective liberation.

The online world is noisy right now. There’s justified fury everywhere and bad news made worse around every corner. I hope that in the midst of all of it we find a way to persevere in tasks small and large that can make a tangible difference. I am not a reader of Tolkien, but a friend shared these words yesterday and they’ve kept me buoyed, so I’ll share them here, too: “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

To mending sweaters and finding our gifts.