The Waves Keep Coming

Trauma, Activism, and Finding Our Place

The ocean stretches before me, endless and rhythmic, a body of water moving in ways I cannot predict but trust nonetheless. I sit here, feeling the salt air on my skin, when my phone vibrates—an alert from a music app. A new album from Bonnie Prince Billy, an artist I’ve loved since my mother first heard him in a small New England bakery called the Hungry Ghost. The new album is called The Purple Bird, and I feel called to listen.

I skim the track list, deciding on instinct to begin with a song called New Water, nestled between Sometimes It’s Hard to Breathe, and Guns Are For Cowards. The song begins, its melody soft, its lyrics rippling through me:

For the sea, I’d wager, for the sea

If there was a thing missed by me

It’s the much-honored chance just to constantly dance

With the waves as they roil ceaselessly

I listen, looking out at the horizon. The waves do not stop. The dance never ends. It is a comfort and a meditation.

But the waves also remind me of this collective moment. The constant push and pull of crisis, the sense that we are always moving, always trying to keep our heads above water, always reckoning with what the tides are carrying in.

I think about the ways we respond to these currents. About activism, about trauma, about how we move through the work of change. About how, sometimes, the work itself feels like trying to swim against an impossible tide. And yet, the song reminds me—there is joy in surrendering to movement. In learning to dance with what is.

Trauma, Transformation, and Collective Reckoning

For years, my husband

Seth Kaufmann

and I have studied trauma—what it is, how it moves through us, and how it shapes both individual lives and entire societies. It began in seminary, in a course on post-traumatic growth, where we studied how people are transformed—not just harmed—by trauma. How something shattering can become an opening. How survival can give way to resilience, to a deeper sense of purpose, to something sacred being forged in the fire of suffering.

That early study planted a seed, and over the years, Seth went deeper, diving into the science of the nervous system and fascia, the physiological realities of how trauma imprints on the body and how we can resolve trauma through the body. Together, we studied not just personal trauma, but collective trauma—the ways entire cultures carry the wounds of violence, displacement, oppression. We studied ancestral trauma, the ways history lives in our DNA And the subtle traumas—less obvious but no less profound—the ways systems of extraction, overwhelm, alienation, and disconnection shape us without us even realizing.

All of this is more relevant now than ever.

We are living through an age of immense collective trauma.

And how we move through this moment—whether we remain trapped in trauma responses or metabolize them into something transformative—will shape not just our own lives, but the future we are co-creating.

Meeting Myself in the Current

Something has surprised me about my own response to this moment.

Last year, my body manifested a lot of symptoms of two of the four main trauma responses: freeze and fight, cycling between dread, anxiety, and action. I was full of fear about what I sensed was coming, but I refused to be immobilized by it. I worked with that anxiety, shaped it into movement, poured it into action that felt aligned with my values, with my vision of the world I want to live in.

And now that we are here, I am horrified, but I am not surprised.

But what has surprised me is this: I am not collapsing. I am not stuck in the spiral of dread that once overtook me. Meeting my trauma responses with presence and conscious choice last year changed me. It didn’t remove my grief, my fear, or my anger—but it transformed my relationship to them. And it made my commitment to building the world I long for even stronger.

I no longer move from panic. I move from purpose.

And that, I think, is what this moment is asking of all of us.

Three Dimensions of Activism

Joanna Macy speaks of activism as having three interwoven dimensions, each essential to what she calls The Great Turning—the shift from an extractive, death-making culture to one that supports life.

• Holding Actions – The urgent interventions that stop immediate harm. Direct action, protests, lawsuits, mutual aid. The frontline work of resistance. This is what most people think of when they hear, “activism.“ To some, it is a strong calling. To others, this is not so viable. I have a number of chronic illnesses that has made this category quite inaccessible to me for most of my life (except mutual aid, which is a lifeline to all of us, especially the disabled). This has required me to orient myself more toward the latter two:

• Structural Change – The work of building new systems, of shifting policies and economies, of designing structures that support regeneration rather than extraction. This is where we begin to craft real alternatives to the systems we are resisting. It is the work of cooperative economics, regenerative agriculture, community-led governance, and reimagining industries in ways that center care over control. It is policy work and institutional transformation. It is designing a world where people and ecosystems can thrive, not just survive.

• Shifts in Consciousness – The deep cultural work of changing worldviews, stories, and ways of relating. The spiritual and psychological dimensions of transformation. This is the terrain of narratives, of meaning-making, of how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us. It is the shift from seeing nature as resource to seeing it as relationship. From seeing ourselves as separate from the living world to remembering that we are the living world. This kind of activism does not always look like activism. It can be poetry, ritual, storytelling, art. It can be therapy, decolonization work, ancestral healing. It can be learning to be in right relationship—with land, with history, with each other. It is the work of unlearning and reimagining. It is slow work, often invisible, but without it, structural change cannot hold.

None of these exist in isolation. We need all three.

They feed and inform and shape one another. And yet, how we engage with them—where we naturally gravitate and where we struggle—has everything to do with how trauma moves through us.

How Trauma Moves Through Activism

Each of us carries trauma, whether personal, ancestral, or collective. And in moments of crisis, our bodies respond in patterned ways—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These survival responses are not just individual; they ripple through movements, shaping how we engage with the work of change. When we are aware of them, we can breathe and move our way through them, so that we are operating more as our clear, authentic selves than as our reactive, habituated, survival response selves.

• Fight – The response of confrontation. Often found in Holding Actions—protests, direct resistance, legal battles. It can manifest as righteous anger and courage, but also as burnout, hyper-vigilance, or endless cycles of conflict. It is the front-line activist, the whistleblower, the warrior who refuses to back down. But fight mode, when unchecked, can also become an exhausting cycle of reactivity, where every moment feels like a battle and rest feels like failure.

• Flight – The impulse to escape. In activism, this can look like focusing on Structural Change—creating alternatives, building the new—while sometimes avoiding direct confrontation with harm. It can be visionary, but also a form of bypassing, a way of seeking safety in new systems without fully reckoning with what must be dismantled. It is the builder, the dreamer, the one who turns away from the crumbling and toward the possible. But flight mode can also mean running from discomfort rather than facing the necessary work of rupture and repair.

• Freeze – The shutting down, the paralysis of overwhelm. This is the moment when the scope of crisis feels too vast, when action feels impossible. It is the weight of despair, the numbness that keeps people from engaging at all. Freeze is not failure; it is the nervous system attempting to protect itself. And sometimes, stillness is necessary. Sometimes, it is the pause before the next right action. But freeze can also become a trap, a cycle of inertia that prevents movement toward healing and change.

• Fawn – The response of appeasement, of making peace at any cost. It often shows up in the work of Shifts in Consciousness—seeking harmony, building bridges—but sometimes avoiding necessary rupture. It is the peacemaker, the healer, the one who holds space for transformation. But fawn mode can also mean prioritizing comfort over truth, keeping the peace at the expense of justice.

None of these responses are inherently wrong—they are adaptations. There is deep intelligence in them. They have allowed us to survive. But when we move unconsciously from trauma responses rather than from clear, intentional choice, we risk being swept away by the tides rather than learning to move with them.

Metabolizing Trauma, Finding Our Place

We do not have to be at the mercy of our trauma responses. We can meet them, learn from them, and move through them into something new.

When we recognize our patterns, we can choose our movements.

When we tend to our nervous systems, we can stay in the work without burning out.

My mother’s definition of humility is “to know your place and take it.“ There’s something immensely powerful about the wide open field that that definition offers, the self-knowledge and integrity it requires, and the way it unflinchingly demands that we orient ourselves to the broader field of interdependence to which we belong.

When we find our place alongside others, when we remember that the work of transformation is not ours to carry alone, we can release the weight of urgency and step into regenerative action: a way of engaging that nourishes us, our loved ones, and the living world to which we all belong more than that which is extracted. We then know ourselves within the great web of being, and we are able to see the world’s potential with the eyes of love.

Returning to the Water

The ocean is still here. Moving, shifting, unceasing. It does not ask itself whether it is fighting or fleeing, freezing or fawning. Every storm passes, and even glaciers are defined by their constant movement. Water moves with what is, reshaping itself in response to the winds, the tides, the pull of the moon.

And I, too, am still here. Changed, but here. No longer afraid of drowning. No longer trying to control the waves.

Just learning to move with them.

It’s the water

It’s the water

Let us wallow, baby, oh, let us play

And always curiously exploring how to flow forward.

This past year, that commitment to flow has become more than just a personal practice—it’s become something I’ve been honored to share with others.

Through my consultation offering, Systems for Flow, I’ve worked with remarkable activists, creators, and leaders—people doing the hard, necessary work of transformation—who have found places of stuckness, friction, and overwhelm in their lives. Together, we’ve designed subtle, powerful shifts in their lives, creating systems that support connection, coherence, and greater loving presence. The results have been beautiful.

If you’re feeling that pull—if you, too, are looking for ways to move from resistance into rhythm, from burnout into balance, from reactivity into deep, intentional action—I invite you to reach out. The work ahead of us is vast, but we do not have to navigate it alone.

The tide is shifting. And we are learning, together, how to move with it.