“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.”

– Frank Herbert

I write to you on a beautiful spring morning, the sun shining through the windows, and the warm breeze bringing forth the promise of summer. Here in upstate NY, the ancestral home of the Mohican peoples, I feel a tension between the calm and the chaos of our world today. In the so called “United States,” it feels that many of us committed to goals of liberation and justice are finding it difficult to find hope. Last week, an unprecedented leak from the Supreme Court seemed to ensure that the vague and limited protections from the Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey rulings will be overturned, thus adding to the ability of states to further limit reproductive rights. In Ukraine, we seem to be watching an escalating massacre unfolding, played out with Russian bombs funded by European energy needs and US death machines perfected through the devastation of black and brown populations around the world. The silent bombs still drop in Yemen as the most unheard of crisis rages. COVID-19 continues to demonstrate its defiance of any country’s desire to go back to “normal.” On a global scale, politics as we know it is dying with a deep polarization of the populace in contrast to the continued allegiance of politicians to a growth economy – the same economy that continues to marginalize the oppressed worldwide. And lest we forget, India, Pakistan and New Mexico have become a small version of hell, reminding us that the climate crisis has not gone anywhere. Yet the trees still bud, babies are still being born and elders continue to build community. How are we, those committed to a medicine of liberation, to move forward? What is our next step amidst the chaos? We can return to the tenets of any liberation movement. First we must observe – we must study the world to work to understand the issues from both a macro and micro scale. Then we judge who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. And in the era of climate change, let us broaden our scope of who is oppressed, and see that the more than human world has often been left out of “Western civilized” plans. Finally, we act in accordance with the desires of those oppressed. But as expected, this is no easy solution; it is merely an invitation to realign our relationships with the worlds around us.

Within DGH, we have been honored to walk the path of Liberation Medicine and relationship building with communities in Mexico, El Salvador, the US, Europe and Africa for over 25 years. We continue the struggle to reframe our understanding of the world, to join with the forces fighting against extractivism, neo-liberal policies and exploitation. It is a slow, long process; one that takes lifetimes, and brings in the ancestors before us and the angels yet to come. We support our communities locally and globally, to see the importance of the balance between large and small actions. And we allow ourselves to change. As we continue to support our partner communities, we are also working to reorganize DGH, consider a name change and restructure. We thank you for your continued support in this process and will have more information at an upcoming General Assembly, to be held virtually in the fall of 2022.

As we continue to move forward into the unknown, let us remember that the apocalypse is already here. Our indigenous comrades and the extinct species of the world remind us daily of that fact. And yet they continue their struggle towards right relationship with the world. Let us not try to solve the unsolvable, but rather to be moved by the world, to allow ourselves to flow with it, to be in relationship with the world around us. Let us walk and question, together, into the chaos.