What a start to 2026. Can you feel this moment growing new muscles and mindsets in you? I certainly can.
I’ve been protesting in front of my local Hilton, joining SURJ training calls, calling my senator and begging him to oppose any appropriations bill that maintains ICE funding. I’m weeping alongside other people in the pews at my church as our pastor rings a ceremonial bell 10 times in honor of the 10 shots that killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti. I’m gathering with other like-minded friends a\]d talking about how we can show up even more strategically and leverage our own gifts, resources, excess, networks etc. in this moment. I’m talking about right-sizing our own risk and looking for the helpers with my terrified 9-year-old. And I’m making plans for the nationwide shutdown on Friday, 1/30/26. Join me in any and all of these things? I think collective action and grief are core to our literal and emotional survival right now!
I’ve been leaning on these two books very heavily in the last couple of months: Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, both by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and her crew. They have been great accompaniment. So in the spirit of my friend Christie George’s beautiful book report project, I made what follows. It really helped me integrate what most stuck with me from my reading, and what I feel like I most need to integrate in the days, week, months, and years ahead.
I would love to hear what you think, what strikes you, what feels hard or helpful.
A book report on Hospicing + Outgrowing Modernity
Books (2) by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, GTDF (the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective) + AI (!!!)
“Modernity tends to accommodate the circulation of critique as long as the critique does not have purchase.”
“Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems to be solved rather than complicated predicaments that need to be confronted.”
“Digest the teachings that death offers…Assist with the birth of something new without suffocating what is being born with projections and idealization.”
“Hospicing involves intellectual accountability and existential surrender. Midwifery involves intellectual surrender and existential accountability.”
“We are cute and pathetic characters in this cosmic plot.”
“Trust the invisible to make the impossible possible.”
We are socialized to crave “coherence, control, consumption, convenience, certainty, comfort.”
“The investment in coherence…severely limits our capacity to face and address plurality, uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowability—both within ourselves and the world.” Instead she recommends you imagine yourselves as a bus full of different characters with different POVs, trauma, and capacities.
Instead we must be “decentering, disarming, and dethroning the ego, decluttering the unconscious, deactivating affective land mines, developing responsive discernment, and disinvesting from modern/colonial desires.”
“The journey of healing will inevitable involve the medicines of shadows, sorrows, contradictions, and the absurd.”
“Acceptance without endorsement.”
“AI emerges as more than a tool or a threat…it mirrors our own relational failtures.”
“We need to slow down in order to grow up.”
“emotional sobriety, intellectual discernment, relationship maturity, intergenerational and interspecies responsibility”
“What if recalibration of our vital compass requires sensefullness rather than meaningfulness?”
“It is an invitation to inhabit the discomfort of recognizing that no solutions is pure, no path is free of complicity, and no perspective holds the full picture. This doesn’t mean abandoning political struggles or dismissing the importance of securing immediate material needs; it means approaching action with a humility that recognizes its limits and a responsibility that embraces its entangled consequences.”
Just want to say that I love what you did with the wisdom of this book, Courtney! What a wonderful way to dwell in that wisdom, and to let it dwell in you. And I was delighted to see that Stella's and my favorite animal, the noble turtle, made it into one of your drawings. "Slow down to grow up"—truer words were never spoken!
I loved hearing you mention HM recently and knowing you were getting this work into your system. I have tried reading it, and still want to try again, but haven’t been able to stay with it just yet. Even so, the first couple of chapters - and what I can tell they are gesturing towards - have influenced me deeply. I’d love to talk more about it when I read the whole thing. Thanks for your book report.
Just want to say that I love what you did with the wisdom of this book, Courtney! What a wonderful way to dwell in that wisdom, and to let it dwell in you. And I was delighted to see that Stella's and my favorite animal, the noble turtle, made it into one of your drawings. "Slow down to grow up"—truer words were never spoken!
I loved hearing you mention HM recently and knowing you were getting this work into your system. I have tried reading it, and still want to try again, but haven’t been able to stay with it just yet. Even so, the first couple of chapters - and what I can tell they are gesturing towards - have influenced me deeply. I’d love to talk more about it when I read the whole thing. Thanks for your book report.