Beloved Mission Belonging Community,
I have started and stopped and restarted writing this letter many times.
What a complicated thing it is to be perched under a shelter during a catastrophic storm. The umbrella tilts: we lose funding. Our community rights it: our programs are intact.
The wind is blowing, there is hail, but where I am, just the points of my elbows and tips of my toes are wet. So many are drenched or washed away by the destruction. What shelters me feels flimsy, held together by luck.
There is the storm you can see from space, and the many smaller storms everywhere we look, river by river, city block by city block, house by house, body by body.
This year my beloved lost her lighthouse of a grandmother. My sister and mother and close friend each lost an extremely dear person, the sort of person whose story is intertwined with our own understanding of who we are. A dear friend lost her sister. Another lost her mother, another their father. And we all know it from the workshops too: the loss of companion animals, beloved partnerships, hard-earned careers. Absence everywhere (and poking through the cracked earth, the bright bloom of care, tenderness, opportunities to love).
It may come as no surprise to you at all that I sat down to write this surrounded by stacks of my most flagged and marked books. Outside my window, three raggedy brown squirrels chase one another, the weather is unseasonably warm, they celebrate. Inside, my playlist beats on, it is early morning, the sky seems pure white, but if I take a moment to look it is not all one thing. The clouds are churning and spotted with gray, in some thin patches I think I see blue.
I thumb through one book, read the passages I’ve marked, sometimes find a sentence I neglected to mark. So I add another note, then pick up another book. As you can imagine, this is not an efficient way to produce. But I need their voices. Audre Lorde, Rabindranath Tagore, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, Gregory Orr, June Jordan, Michael Meade, Annie Dillard, Clarissa Pinkola Estès and so many others who survived the same strata of storms we are cowering beneath: political violence, personal grief, uncertainty.
Many of these books shaped my philosophy during the years when I began the work that became Mission Belonging. Nearly each and every one of the lines I’ve underlined points to the necessity of creativity and self-discovery, often with an emphasis on connection across difference.
In those early days, when I took my seat in the circle of witnesses, spending my days in treatment room after treatment room hearing stories of immense grief from people whose experiences were so different from my own (and who often didn’t like me one little bit), these ideas sustained me. They were proven again and again by the people who sat around a table and exposed the contours of their hearts to me and everyone else in the room.
Each of us is proof that there has always been another way to survive. One that isn’t brutality and denial and cynicism. A way for our softness to be exposed and valued and nurtured. Proof that seeing the world through our softness can be a personal source of strength. I need it now more than ever. I think perhaps we all do.
Not one of us would be here if our ancestors hadn’t discovered poetry and story to get to connection, a way to love beyond one’s immediate family. They discovered the tools and handed them to us (language, technology, community centers), but the lessons can’t be passed on. We must each learn them ourselves, together, to strive to be more deeply human.
I think that’s what we’re doing when we come together week after week, with our griefs and our joy, when we shelter one another’s softness in our workshops.
We could not do it without each and every one of you.
Here’s to hoping the rain lets up in 2026, and to continuing to shelter one another if it doesn’t.
Seema Reza
some wisdom
Muriel Rukeyser:
“All we can be sure of is that our art has life in time, it serves human meaning, it blazes on the night of the spirit; all we can be sure of is that at our most subjective we are universal; all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love.”
Audre Lorde:
“If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us–that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it.”
Michael Meade:
“What exiles us more than anything is the separation from our own instinctive, intuitive way of being.”
Gregory Orr:
“The more of our own stories that we can tell, the richer and more complex our selves become. The richer a use we make of our past experiences, the more open we are to present experience.”
James Baldwin:
“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”
John Mason Brown:
“No school of philosophy can boast a better teacher than peril, when it approaches at a pace lively enough to be contemplated.”
Seema Reza is a poet and essayist and the author of two books: A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Writing and Community Building from Goddard College. In 2010 Seema began working with service members, veterans, and their families at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and has since developed a unique multi-hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization. In 2015, the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore awarded Seema the Col John Gioia Patriot Award for her work with service members in military hospitals. Seema is a 2019 George W. Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Scholar.
