Liberation Through Rest (Pause and Resist)
An invitation to imagine collective resistance.
As a person who doesn’t see movies alone often, I made a spontaneous solo trip for Hayao Miyazaki’s new film The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live? is the Japanese title) as a tribute to the previous time I’d seen a film of his in the theatre. It has been more than 20 years and I am still stirred by Spirited Away.
After listening to a new favourite podcast on which this film and Miyazaki’s oeuvre are discussed, I have been thinking about those who are surviving, dying, and grieving in Gaza, and my therapy clients who have shared their struggles and grief with me in sessions in the past months as witnesses to the atrocities.
How do you live after having experienced something terrible? How do you live when the something terrible is ongoing? And how do you live knowing senseless murder and violence is happening on an institutionalized, inhuman level, in many places, all the time?