 which is, which is psychopathic. So the whole, I know she, so, you know, grounding ourselves, rooting ourselves, rooting those are close to us. You know, I just want to remind you of that image last week of, you know, our circle of, you know, values, our circle of what we value and is here and our circle of influence is a little circle inside of that. And that's sanity, that's humanity, that's relational. And my son, who I was just talking about with Dominique was telling me that in his work, he's really dealing with a lot of people that are very disturbed. And he said, you know, mom, like, what is that about people in America that think they can solve the problems of the world? And that's when you live inside of an empire, it affects your thinking, just like the war economy affects your thinking in your behavior. So bringing our own selves back to what it is to be relational, one of those things is that, you know, having that sphere of influence be smaller than the sphere of your values and what you're concerned about. So yes, we can be concerned about the whole world. We can be concerned about the genocide. We can be concerned about the devastation to the planet of our behaviors that are destroying it. We can be concerned about a nuclear war. And then when we can be concerned from the place of influence, that is those we touch, which is sanity. Because then we can actually have a healthy relationship to the grief we're feeling, to the desperation that it can cause inside of us and then move into being in relationship with what we are in relationship with to create what is necessary in this moment. And for each of us that is different and that leads us to what today is about. First, I always wanna check in with all of you and, you know, Emily, I'm Jodiom, the co-founder of Code Pink and Emily. I'm Emily, I'm the local peace economy coordinator at Code Pink, great to see you all this evening. Yeah, you can ask everybody to check in before we moved into the program. Sure, I'd love to share a poem before we do that if that's okay, yeah, okay, great. As we've been starting with a piece of culture, a way of grounding this evening, we're gonna start with a poem called The Summer Day by Mary Oliver, which you may or may not know. Just gonna take a breath. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean, the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand. Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down. Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down into the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Yeah, I love the engagement with the fingers and the heart reactions and yeah, making Zoom a little bit more embodied, I love it. So as Jodi mentioned, we'll just, as we've been doing, taking just a couple of minutes to check in before we go into tonight's topic, which is stories. But yeah, I just wanna open the floor for people to share a little bit about what's been alive for you over the last several weeks as you've delved into local peace economy, whether you're working through the workbook or however you're engaging with this. What have you noticed? What shifts have you been making? What resistance have you been meeting? And also I know that some of you are new to this space as well. You're not necessarily new to local peace economy work, but you might be new to this container that we have here. So you're also welcome to share what's been alive for you that's brought you here. Floor is open. John. Go ahead. Oh, you're muted, John. People hear me. Yeah, now we can. And people hear me, yeah. Okay, yeah, so every day I read emails that I get from left organizations signed to keep up with changes that keep happening. And I've never been a patriot. If there's such a thing as being a patriot of the planet, I'm a super patriot. And I just, you know, I guess my biggest question is for us on the left is how to be effective. The greedy rich and the right-winger seem to be good at it. But maybe some of you have some ideas about how that would work. Thanks, John. Good question. The war economy structure is a big thing and it's got all the weapons and it's got all the money and it's also got most of the mines. So I think it kind of goes to what I was saying earlier. It's finding your relationship with it because I think a lot on the left, everybody, you know, it's like, we're right. So why doesn't it conform when the right and the elite are creating it? You know, it's not a rightness. It's like a literal, and this really goes to the story part of what we're gonna talk about today is it hooks our hearts and our minds against ourselves. It comes in and grabs us and uses us. And it really speaks to the unrooting of people that we've been unrooted from that sense of values, the sense of, you know, what concerns and we become just fodder for the elite, for capitalism and for the war economy to use. And I think that's what you call in them being effective. They're also effective in disrupting. You know, one of their biggest tools is to separate and divide. And we've been divided and separated and chaos has been created over and over again. And just creating chaos that distorts and distracts. I mean, I think one of those is elections. I don't know if everybody knows, but it's a $5 trillion industry of people who work to distort us and manipulate our minds. And, you know, people can think, oh, but Trump, and I'm just like, oh, but Trump, for me, Trump is the least of my problems. We have a nuclear war hovering over us and we have a planet that's in, you know, in a collapse. And we get distracted in this hate and fear about things that we can have a relationship with and have an opinion about, but to be creating like Putin and Trump. I mean, these are just men. You know, it's like, they represent systems. They represent ideologies. It's like, it's no different today. Oh my, oh dear Trump than to say, oh dear Hamas. Hamas is an ideology. It's a value system. And for me, it's a resistance to oppression and violence. And you're creating these like poster children of things that then distort your capacity to be in relationship with what is happening. What is actually happening at a deeper core level and figuring out what you are related to. You know, what you are being used and where your values are actually being sucked into. So it's, they're very, as you say, John, they own the, they own all the airwaves. Like they're, you know, why ban TikTok? Because TikTok is the only social media that is not run by the State Department. They don't have control of TikTok. So, you know, it's, you know, getting out from under the war economy and so it takes us back to, as I said, it's like we have to come back to a healthy relationship, which is very hard when we've been addicted to this other where we've been made to think we live in an empire so we should be able to affect these big things. And at Couping, I've always said, you know, we can't end war till we end the war economy. And that means ourselves taking ourselves off the war economy and investing ourselves in a more healthy, beautiful future, which is hard to do when it's, you know, trying to just, trying to take your attention and pull it into all these other directions instead of like really being able to take yourself off of it and put yourself into cultivating the future. It's a hard process. We don't realize how much we've been used by it. And we wanna be able to have major effect like they do on things, but until we can literally relate ourselves, find our own little shovel and be shoveling the new world, it will continue to use us. And it's a hard thing to comprehend and it takes a little while to unravel ourselves from it. And today we're gonna talk about story and I can't believe it, but we have one of the great storytellers of the local peace economy with us, Rivera Sun. So, Rivera, we're gonna say a few things, but I mean, once we're done, I know you're gonna have a lot more to add because you are, this is a woman who literally spent her days telling stories and leaving the future with her stories. So I'm gonna just say a little. So, one of the powers, John, that they have is the power of story, but it's not the power of the story we're talking about. It's the power to take a story and weaponize your heart and mind with it by going in and looking something that you value and then using you. And we wanna be able to tell stories that open, liberate, and free, but because story, it takes the familiar and takes us into the unknown through the familiar. So it's, that's why metaphor is so powerful. By finding the metaphor that opens up the world, but a story connects the familiar to the unfamiliar. And that's how we use story in the local peace economy because it's kind of like, well, first of all, story has existed through millennia. Story is the connective tissue. Story is the connective tissue that connects through time. It's what happened around the campfire. It was the relational place around the campfire to describe reality. So that's the story we're talking about. And with the local peace economy, which has existed for millennia, the local peace economy is the connective tissue that nourish life that has been distorted by the war economy, by capitalism, by violence, by the need to control, by greed, all of that has distorted. The role story has been playing throughout millennia to serve life, to help us find our way forward through the stories that are told. I mean, think of fairy tales, that these are powerful tools, but they've been weaponized. And so where is the story that contracts, that takes us into being used by hate, greed, control, or where are the stories that liberate us into a future that is about connectivity, is about love, is about what life needs. So that's very much where story is so core to what we do, the stories we tell each other, the stories that inspire us. Because also stories are inspirational. They're what let, they nourish the heart. So right now, what in this time of so many generations of the war economy, when we say peace economy, some people don't have a relation to it. And it's like looking out at a field and a forever of snow, where there's no markers. And so many of these stories that we use to being markers into imagination of what we can create for the future that is the past meeting, the present meeting, a future that we need that serves life. So those are the stories that we're looking to and you are one of those storytellers and you're here with us. Also you're someone who cultivates a local peace economy in the north of New Mexico. I wonder if you want to share anything after kind of after my riffing off of story is of your own relationship with you as a storyteller. Just a very brief comment, you mentioned fairy tales and I remember and they lived happily ever after. And I figured, well, maybe he did but I'm not sure about her. They're the patriarchy, yes. Thank you for bringing that in, John. Vera. I am so proud of my housemate, my 85 year old housemate called John. All right, Vera, take it away. Well, I've loved listening to you and I'm so glad the thing that was in conflict with this evening or part of this evening got canceled so I could come. I just could have been twinkling, fingering the whole time that you were speaking, especially this idea that stories are much older than war and the war economy. Humans have been around for 300,000 years as homo sapiens, sapiens. War has only been around for 12,000 years. It's a relatively new invention and the scope of human history. And you can bet your boots that story, we were telling lots of heroic, amazing, mythic, incredible stories before war came along and co-opted all of that power, all of that magic, all of that storytelling capacity to expand our imagination, all of our values of courage, protection, determination, strength, creativity, resilience and said, okay, now we're gonna attach this to this idea of organized violence towards other human beings. So they stole it. They stole all of this power and what we're talking about is taking it back, saying, no, you've had it long enough, you don't get to play with these toys anymore, you've been abusing them. And that's a lot of what the work that I do as both an activist and a novelist is and I think one of the things that I work on is taking the fantasy genre and saying, what if a war, the goal of the heroes in the fantasy genre isn't to win the war, but to stop the war? No, what if Code Pink was the heroes of our fantasy stories? Instead of the Hunger Games, they're like trying to survive this horrible children killing children thing. They actually have all the tools of nonviolent action and all the tools of resistance and resilience that we know about as peace activists. And so I'm getting ready to release the next one. There's about six books in the series now and the newest ones about to come out this week, which we're doing with the crowdfunding campaign, which is, this is how it connects literally to the nuts and bolts of peace economy as well, is I'm not published by the big five publishers, they aren't lining up at my doors to make this the next best blood tripping fantasy novel in the New York Times bestseller list. These books are coming into the world because of people who care about peace and story and want to make it happen. So I could say more, but I'd rather hear from everyone else in the stories that you're holding and you're carrying, but I really do feel that this is something very close to my heart and to the way that I live my life and the vision that I have for the work that I'm doing with this one wild and precious life, as Emily was saying with the Mary Oliver poem. Thank you, Rivera. If you could put in the chat, maybe so folks can find their way to your novels and that would be super great. And also I think that was a mic drop with the stories are much older than war. So thank you very much for that. Absolutely. All right, Emily, maybe talk about some stories. Yeah, I just wanted to share my own relationship with stories in this work and then we'll go into some breakout rooms. So I'm preparing for this call tonight. I thought a lot about what I wanted to share about stories and I kept coming back to this conviction that I needed to reflect and share on the way that I relate to my own story in this work, the story I'm telling with my life, my one wild and precious life again, in the way it's part of a larger tapestry of stories, telling a collective story. So I'm gonna share two photos with you. So let me just get that screen sharing going. Oh, here it is. Okay, is this gonna be the right one? Let's see. Let's do, sorry, everything's open here. Okay, are you seeing that full screen? Yeah. Okay, so this photo is from an article called Roots Deeper Than Whiteness and I'm happy to share that, we'll link to that article later. And the caption of this photo in the article is, it's called The Melting Pot of the English School of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. Upon graduation from the Ford Motor Company's Americanization Program, tens of thousands of European immigrant employees would walk into this large melting pot wearing their traditional ethnic attire. Their teachers would stir the pot with large ores and they would change into suits, grab American flags and walk out of the pot Americanized. I think about this photo all the time because when I first saw it, I just had such a visceral emotional reaction to it because to me it reflects such an important piece of my own story, specifically as a white-bodied person in the U.S. And as far as I know, no one in my family worked for the Ford Motor Company, but in many ways, I feel like whiteness, empire and dominant U.S. culture has really succeeded in rooting in my family. In just two generations, the vast majority of my family now lives by the values and narratives of dominant U.S. culture. We have been acculturated into it, separating from ways of being culture to the earth and to each other that were present previously in our lineage. And just like that, we've been Americanized and with that Americanization have accepted all the false and distorted stories about liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness that comes with that. Over time and in my own context, like many of you, I came to understand that I didn't wanna pass on this story with my life and that I wanted to live out a different story. And that story is always unfolding and takes many forms. So it's not like I haven't made narrative to tell of it, at least not in this moment. But along the way, I am inspired by other communities that show me the possibilities of another way. Communities like El Castillo, an intentional community living on and with the land near Lake Attitlan in Guatemala. And I just spent several days with a couple of weeks ago and I have a photo here. This is, I have very few photos from my time there because I was not on my phone because I was just able to be present. But this is, to the left is the, their kitchen here, which is shared. I'm in kind of a living space and this is just a peek outside to the, where kind of their dining area, honestly outside. El Castillo really is a peace economy. They share meals and cooking and cleaning responsibilities. They care for one another's children and I have never in my life seen such free children. Like they're running around in the land. They take care of each other. They take, it just, it made me emotional, honestly, to see these children just living the way that they're living. And yeah, they take care of each other's children. They welcome in travelers like me. They live off the grid and source water from a nearby spring. They have ceremonies on the land and just outside the door here, you can see. You might be able to see there's a clothing rack where people can put clothes they no longer want or need or their children's clothes once they grow out of them since there's multiple families living on the land for others to use freely. And the stories I had been given by my culture through my family, through my schooling would never reveal something like El Castillo to me. But now El Castillo is a deep source of inspiration for me and one of my close friends, because we see the future we wanna help create being lived out in the world in the story of El Castillo. And this friend and I have talked for several years about creating something like this together, but now that we've both spent time in El Castillo, we have an embodied experience of it and have learned from their story. And there's a new spark for us in these conversations about what we can create together. And it feels so much more real and so much more possible. Yeah, so that's what I wanted to share about stories tonight. Thank you, Emily. You know, I think stories are also prayers. And I just wanna say that going through the halls of Congress every day that we really lead with stories and we have doctors and teachers and mothers and Palestinians with us telling their personal stories. And there was this one woman, we went to the offices of the 24 women who were in the Progressive Congress of the Democratic Party but had it called for ceasefire. And one of them had received a million dollars from APAC and we went into her office and they didn't want us to meet in her office. We met outside with three of her staff members, all women. And they had only heard the propaganda from APAC, which is a story that they tell that no one is allowed to hear but the members. Like we don't even know because they know we could poke holes in all of it. And so we told these stories and the staff members started to cry that they didn't like, that's how far they were from the truth that we were the first truth and they started to cry. So it really is telling these stories from our hearts, from our experiences and staying in the beauty of what it is to be human and connected is rare. I wanna say being in the halls of Congress, I had no idea how rare that they are sold so many lies and so much distortion. And we look at the layers and layers of propaganda like the New York Times is just propaganda. You know, it is just propaganda for the war economy. So to be able to tell and inspire with our stories is really also a prayer. And so we're gonna go into breakouts, let's see. How about like groups of threes is I think what everybody's favorite thing is in the breakout rooms. So, oh wait, before we go in the breakout room, could everyone put their camera on because we wanted to take a photo of all of you to put on the website of inviting people to join us. And we wanted to get folks like join this little community here. So if anybody that feels like they can wanna take, put themselves on camera. Of course, yes, in whatever playful way possible. I want to tell the story of this. Okay, you can in your breakout group because if we don't win the breakout group, we won't be. Oh yeah, there's a good story about Molly Ivins. Thanks, Sandra, who spent some of her last days with the Codepinkers on retreat in Austin, which was such a gift. So, you ready, Emily? Everyone ready? Smile, you can put peace signs up, whatever feels good to you, but I'll take a screenshot here. Okay, ready? All right, let me do one more just in case. Oh, Miss, you two look so adorable up there. All right, we're good to go. Thank you so much. All right, now I'm gonna put everybody in their breakout rooms. There'll be five rooms. Make sure you go in your room. And Emily's gonna put in the chat if you could say out loud what it is before they go. Sure, yes, I'm putting in the chat now. But the question is what's one story you've inherited from our culture and how are you continuing to tell that story or not with your life? Does the story align with the future you want to create? All right, so we'll also, there it is in the chat and we'll also put it in your room. We'll see you in 15 minutes. So anyone have something that they talked about they wanna share with the whole group? Raise your hand. Any story you were affected by that someone else told that made you think in a new way? Dominique. I want to say I was very happy to be with Joy and Liz. And Joy is the reason why I've come back to these meetings because the first time she spoke at a little breakout group, she said, oh, I'm a poet and oh, I don't know what I can do. And I have been thinking of her, even talking about her to Fred saying, oh, I met this poet who thinks she can't do anything because the role of art is so incredible. Anyway, I'm an elder, but I want to encourage Liz, our third person who unfortunately had troubles with her sound. So we didn't hear much of her, but I want to invite her to, you know, she's her first time. She's a young person. And I think as elders, we need to embrace her and encourage her. How about that, Liz? I think that was beautiful, Dominique. Liz, it sounds like you didn't get to share a story. Is there? Yeah. I did at the very last minute. My audio wasn't cooperating, but it was a joy to listen to Dominique and Joy. So I really enjoyed being able to go into the breakout room and to hear how meetings have gone before them. It's just really nice to hear other people discuss these things. Cool. Well, thank you for the love and care, Dominique. And that's what we're about, is how do we recognize each other and give care and love? Anyone else? Have a story, Sandra? Well, I think because I'm saying is Vara's name right, because we're both older, we've kind of shared the inherited stories from our culture. And she's from Chile, but lived in this country quite a while. And we found our stories now kind of merge around living in communes or in a communal way. Emily mentioned that also. And wasn't enough time to develop things very fully, not very satisfying. And there were only two of us. But I mentioned that I went to seminary and worked on a thesis on the need for a theology of liberation for the oppressors and the not so oppressed. And how the base communities in Brazil, people who've been poor and whose families have been poor and they saw their children poor and they were going to be poor that these base communities helped them tell their stories so that they understood why they were poor and they understood where they were today and they knew where they were going to go. And it wasn't about their children growing up poor like they had. And big changes came out of that. So that's, you know, we wanna see grassroots who want that to happen. And what I like about the local economy is it kind of feels like it'd be a good base community. And this is a small group and we're from all over the place, which is wonderful. But, well, I've said enough. That's about it for our short time together. Well, that was perfect. Thank you very much. And I also wanna say that, you know, the MST, who you're referring to in Brazil is, you know, definitely a part of our work. And I work with them a lot. And I'm gonna put in the chat, I did a webinar with them this week on hyperimperialism, which is kind of what we're living in, which it's just being defined. And it was people all over the world that work in local peace economies from Chile to Sri Lanka to Africa, you know, to talking about this hyperimperialism and how it affects you. So, I mean, it's in the chat and Emily will include it in the follow-up notes if you wanna take a look at that. I'm the last speaker after two hours. Vijay Prashad is the host of us. So, if you wanna really, it's a good learning. It goes from Lebanon. I'm the last person from the belly of the beast. So kind of a little bit of a worldview, but you'll get to see Yopedro Sedley, who's one of the leadership of the landless people in Brazil, which is a million and a half strong, all rooted in the liberation theology, which is, you know, the local peace economy and the sharing of stories and inspiring each other to the future and inspiring life with our stories. So, I'm really low-tech and I don't know what to do with chats and I can never go back and find a chat. It's okay. Emily's gonna send it in the follow-up email. No worries. You don't need to find anything there. So I wanna give Emily time to show us how to look into the stories that are online. Emily, if you wanna share your screen and give us a little tour. Absolutely, yeah. So you have probably seen the local peace economy Wiki linked in the follow-up emails and the invitation emails, but I just wanted to show it to you in our call here. So, and again, this link, I'll put it in the chat and it'll be in the local piece. It'll be in the follow-up email, but it's the Wiki Observatory and there's a local peace economy section. And so as you can see here, we have several contributors, Jodi being one of them, April, who's a big piece of the local peace economy team as well as some others. And then we have a couple of other people as some others. And there's all these articles here. I could be scrolling for a long time that people have written largely April right now about local peace economy projects, groups, communities and what they're doing. And it's just a huge source of inspiration. And also as Jodi was talking about, it makes, it brings us into the unknown through the familiar. And I know for me, it's just been really helpful to go through these stories and be like, okay, this is what this looks like in practice. So there's stories about mutual aid, tool lending libraries, moneyless economies, about grief and ritual, which is obviously a big part of the local peace economy work as well, like we've talked about in past weeks. So yeah, we could just keep scrolling, find something that's inspiring to you, share it with others. Yeah, lots of ways into this work. So stop my share and we'll put that link in the chat now. And if you have any questions about that, please feel free to reach out. And I'll also put the link to register for the next call, which will be on March 27. And we'll talk about mapping in that call, which is also included in the workbook. Jodi, do you wanna say anything about mapping before we? Yeah, I just, you know, next week, we'll talk about mapping. And I mean, this is a part that I think is so important because when we started, we talked about being rooted. And so much of what the war economy does is unroot us. And one of the places is just where am I? And what is around me? And I know Macy, you know, we've talked about this before about Macy mapping where she was and really learning. So Macy, maybe you'll, we can assign you to talk next week because you were kind of ahead of everyone on this one. But mapping where we... I just set a coffee appointment with the healthcare worker today who does home health visits, talking about meals on wheels and what we're supposed to do with all these unattended seniors, now that no one's going to their house. And we were on point with that. Absolutely, I wanted to bring from her experience too. So great. So yeah, just mapping, it's like that's part of being relational is where am I? Who's here? Because we have been contorted in our relationship to everything, including just where we are, because we can be like in Palestine, but we can't be present with where we actually are, but we're not actually in Palestine. And I wanna say, you know, just to close off that in Palestine, what is happening is uncushionable and human and a disaster that is so hard to hold. And being relational to where you are can help that because it is intended to distort our psyches and our relationship to our own empathy. And so being able to be rooted and relational to where we live can help our empathy not feel that overload that John was referring to at the beginning. It's like, if we think we're supposed to fix it, which is, you know, impossible, then our own empathy is overburdened and not allowed to be the empathy, the healthy empathy that it is. And unfortunately, things aren't as simple as we would like them to be. They're way more complex and way more dark. And so really being able to be in love, in relationship to be in relationship with what we can only be in relationship with is how we stay sane and also in the end actually be of use to what's happening in Palestine. Because if we can't shift what is where we are relationship, where we have relationship, giving people strength to have their own empathy to be actually for what is human and what is humane, then we, you know, Palestine is showing us where we are going. And when we look at what the bigger problems are, we're all at the effect of them and how do we create what nourishes a future is essentially our task. So we all are here to love and be connected and being care of each other and to be in the truth. And we do that from staring our stories from our hearts. Thank you for being here. Thanks for all you do, you beautiful peacemakers. You make my heart swell with love. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone. See you in two weeks. Thank you guys. Thank you for all you do. Thank you so much.