Staying With the Web

I’ve been reading Belonging by Toko-pa Turner very slowly.

Not because it’s dense, but because it’s precise. It’s the kind of book that rearranges your internal landscape sentence by sentence. I’ve been intentionally taking my time, allowing the memory of the words to meet my current state rather than rushing to collect insights. Sometimes I read the same section over and over for days, until I feel I’ve understood the layers of meaning. The final section, on belonging and animism, landed with particular force last week.

It came after a visit home—a complicated one, but one full of many gifts.

One of those gifts was returning to two small coffee shops I used to frequent as an undergrad, this time with my now 10-year-old daughter. To bring her to the places that served as integral third spaces for me was quietly profound. I know the owners of both spaces—two women who have fought hard to keep their businesses alive, navigating the instability of a fluctuating economy, paying fair wages during times of crisis, and more. The dedicated nourishment they’ve offered to their communities—poured consistently into the soil of an ecosystem that in turn supports a broader communal web—was a sight to behold after all these years.

It reminded me how often we do or do not nourish the webs around us. How we remain selective about who gets to be included in our communal ecosystem—who is allowed to benefit from the nourishment, and who is not.

What’s been surfacing in the quiet is how, in activist, social justice, feminist, and movement spaces, we’ve come to treat boundaries as if they are synonymous with severance.

As a practitioner, coach, and somatic abolitionist, I observe how dominant Western therapeutic framings often encourage us to:
“Cut them off.”
“You owe them nothing.”
“Protect your peace.”

This is the default response toward individuals, groups, or collectives who have caused harm, broken agreements, or failed—as humans inevitably do.

And yes—protection matters. There are real harms that demand space, distance, and safety. But I’m not talking about those edges right now. I’m speaking to the everyday fractures. The communal wounds that quietly rupture the threads of the web we all belong to. The interpersonal harm within our ecosystems. The rifts in community or movement spaces where we begin to say: because you harmed me, you no longer belong.

But what if we saw our responsibility to belonging not as erasure, but as commitment to repair?

What if boundaries could sound more like: You’ve harmed me, and I need boundaries to move toward understanding—not because you’re disposable, but because you matter. Because you are part of my ecosystem, and repair is sacred work.

That’s what animism teaches, isn’t it? That everything belongs. That we are not separate. That even discomfort is part of the living web. Isn’t that a more nourishing way to rebuild fertile soil—pouring into it so that our communal web can heal, grow, and expand, with all of us still part of it?

Western therapeutic culture—especially in its most individualistic form—often mirrors the same carceral logic it claims to resist: isolate the problem, remove the threat, discard what hurts. But, this framework risks reproducing the very systems we say we’re healing from.

Even within abolitionist spaces, we critique the prison industrial complex for how it disappears people deemed irredeemable. And yet, how often do we enact the same logic on a micro scale? In our relationships? In our organizing spaces? In our families?

We block, ghost, exile, silence—not always out of harm, but often out of exhaustion. I understand why. Sometimes it feels like survival. But if we’re committed to ecosystemic belonging, then the real work is learning how to stay. How to set boundaries without turning people into enemies. How to metabolize harm without replicating punishment.

I don’t have tidy answers. But I’m returning to these questions with deeper urgency:

• What does it mean to hold belonging as an ecosystem rather than a gated community?
• What happens to a root system when we sever its parts too quickly?
• And: I truly believe that conflict can be deeply generative if we allow it to be. But how do we stay in conflict long enough to transform it—if our bodies are not prepared to hold conflict?

These articles continue to shape how I think about this:

• Belonging as an Ecosystem – Toko-pa Turner
• To Transform Conflict in Movements, We Must Learn How to Stay in It Together – Truthout
• Moving Toward Conflict for the Sake of Good Strategy – Yotam Marom
• Building Resilient Organizations – The Forge

This isn’t about martyrdom or staying in cycles of abuse. It’s about discerning the difference between harm that disconnects and conflict that invites us into deeper integrity. It’s about refusing to discard people just because they’re hard to love.

It’s about staying with the web—even when the weave is frayed.

With love,

Uma

P.S.
As I write about the severing of ecosystems—emotional, communal, and political—I cannot, and I hope none of us can, look away from the catastrophic, forced famine unfolding in Gaza.

Famine is not an accident. It is engineered through systems of control, of withholding, of punishment. It is the most brutal expression of severance: the intentional disruption of life-sustaining networks—of food, water, medicine, care. It is the logic of disposability taken to its most devastating conclusion.

This is not just about policy. It is about the ongoing dismantling of an entire people’s right to belong—to live, to remain, to root in place.

If we believe in ecosystemic belonging, we must also believe in the sanctity of Palestinian life. And we must act accordingly.

• Name it: Call it what it is—a forced famine and a humanitarian atrocity.
• Contact your representatives and demand an end to military aid and unconditional support for systems of occupation and violence. Call on them to pressure Israel to open the borders and allow aid to be delivered without the threat of violence. There are numerous reports of Palestinians being killed by Israeli forces while attempting to reach designated aid distribution points.
• Stay with the stories. Witnessing is part of the work.

Belonging means we do not turn away.

Not from harm. Not from each other. Not from the sacred web of life being torn.