Relational Uprising

08/11/2026

"Feminists have long since pointed out that those on the bottom of any unequal social arrangement tend to think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them.

Women everywhere tend to think and know more about men’s lives than men do about women, just as black people know more about white people’s, employees about employers’, and the poor about the rich."

- David Graeber

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/caring-too-much-thats-the-curse-of-the-working-classes/

08/06/2026

“It’s as if we launched a war against nature, and that has turned place after place into something that resembles a war zone. The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties.”

Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys

08/02/2026

Ibram X. Kendi traces how the Great Replacement Theory turns demographic anxiety into political grievance—and grievance into authoritarian power.

07/20/2026

“Perhaps what we need is not only more data about ecological decline, but more permission to acknowledge what that decline feels like and means to us. We need to name it for ourselves, acknowledge its personal and local impact, and invest in storytelling that reminds us of the ecological richness we once had access to and did not protect. We need to make more noise about these losses, document them, and mourn them together.”

In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals

07/16/2026

In The Universe Story, Berry and Brian Swimme articulate a cosmological claim with direct ethical implications:

"The earth is a one-time endowment."

— Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)

Four words. The frame is precise. There is no second Earth. Every ecosystem, species, and ecological relationship that has emerged across four billion years of biological evolution is a finite, irreplaceable inheritance.

To grasp the fourteen-billion-year process that produced the Earth is to grasp what is at stake when the Earth is treated as anything other than the one-time endowment it actually is. The Great Work includes treating it accordingly.

What in your life have you been treating as renewable that is actually a one-time endowment?

Carry the Great Work forward at thomasberry.org

07/10/2026

Join us this Summer in the Hudson Valley!
Thursday August 27th through Sunday the 30th. This training will offer a powerful learning experience steeped in the practices of Relational Culture, a framework for building collective relational intelligence. We will weave a communal experience through Relational Uprising’s transformative storytelling and exploratory somatic practice that includes movement, play, and time in nature. Click here for registration https://www.relationaluprising.org/calendar/residential

07/05/2026

"At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to a better world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking.

The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight."

- David Graeber

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse/?fbclid=IwY2xjawS22BlleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeEMqa3xQABqElvoEcvVRIqeAMKZq3_4yGu0EdDMxE4lQST4_8O9VQv8rXW1I_aem_0tjwQqJZSYHKwYDnr_GPnQ

06/25/2026

A new documentary explores a growing body of scientific research documenting the wide range of gender and sexual diversity found in the animal kingdom, from pregnant male seahorses to matriarchal monkey troops. Second Nature, directed by q***r filmmaker Drew Denny, is narrated by Oscar-nominated act...