Dear friends,

I speak a great deal (as you may have noticed!) about the callings of our time. It is a word we need, I believe, before what we more readily name as the challenges and crises before us — ecological, racial, societal, economic. The language of calling honors the reality that, whether we lean in or away, each of us is carrying these great existential dramas in our bodies. To reach for the language of “calling” is to wonder about the invitation for a renewal of life that is always implied in grappling with what is existential. To invoke Janine Benyus, it is to ask how we might work with what is breaking — and a great deal is breaking — towards creating conditions more conducive to life. 

My conversation partner on this week’s show participates in the life of our time in this way, and on some of the sharpest edges of our cultural reckonings. She is a geographer, though that does not begin to fill you in on the passion and magnitude of her thought/action leadership on new life-giving possibilities for our world. She’s a mentor to adrienne maree brown. Darnell Moore and dream hampton spoke of her — they call her Ruthie — in our series on the Future of Hope. And a fascinating New York Times Magazine article — “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind” — made me long to speak with her myself, to ask her my questions.

You’ve no doubt heard the language of “abolition” amidst the fraught and polarized energy that marks our cultural non-dialogues about policing and prisons. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s personal callings open to depths obscured by our cultural tangles and rallying cries. Please listen — your mind and your heart will be filled, and provoked, and intrigued, and elevated. You will be glad Ruth Wilson Gilmore is in the world. You will see that on the other side of the word “abolition” (and she herself struggles with how that word lands) is a long-haul commitment — equal measures patience and urgent, creative pragmatism — to human flourishing. It is a stunning and inviting vision for a world we would all like to inhabit — and for all of our children to inhabit — with surprising entry points towards beginning to get there.

A poem I love by William Stafford, titled “Vocation” (the Latin word for calling), ends with this line: “Your job is to figure out what the world is trying to be.” I could make a strong case that the world is doing its best to turn inwards and hurtle backwards. Ruth Wilson Gilmore revives my faith for another day that the opposite is possible, even at the heart of grapplings that have inflamed and divided us the most.

Maybe make a plan to listen alongside a person of a younger or an older generation in your life?