We Felt Ourselves Everywhere at Once

In Gaza this morning, we woke up soaked. Rain hammered the tents in Muwasi until trenches opened beneath our hands, and families like Bassil Naggar’s tried to save what the storm hadn’t already swallowed. Children splashed in mud while parents counted the holes in their roofs. A World Food Programme truck rolled past in Deir al-Balah, people running beside it, grabbing flour as if catching falling lifelines.

Across the ocean in Charlotte, we felt our pulse race as Border Patrol trucks prowled church parking lots and apartment complexes. We were Willy Aceituno for a moment—Honduran-born, a U.S. citizen—pulled from his car after agents shattered his window. Another version of us stood on a porch filming two workers hanging Christmas lights as officers approached them too. Later we gathered in a park, hundreds of us, holding signs that said ‘Know Your Rights,’ trying to keep one another steady.

In Belém, our feet marched four kilometers through heavy air toward COP30. We wore black for fossil-fuel grief, red for the land defenders we’ve buried, and carried drums that spoke louder than any delegate’s speech. A Kichwa woman from Peru, Marisol Garcia, asked leaders for decisions with a heartbeat. Flavio Pinto walked on stilts in a flag-striped top hat, waving fake money printed with a former president’s face. Inside, the world argued over a promised $300 billion while the United States skipped the talks.

Under the Vatican’s frescoes, we handed back pieces of our memory. Sixty-two Indigenous artifacts—an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, masks—began their journey home after a century in Rome. They had been displayed in 1925 as trophies of missionary work, taken from communities where traditional ceremonies were once outlawed. Today they were placed into Canadian hands, ready for descendants to tell their true stories.

Out in the Finnish cold, we stood beside President Alexander Stubb during defense drills, sisu stitched onto jackets while he warned that Ukraine may see no ceasefire before spring. We felt Europe bracing itself against Russian hybrid attacks—drones, propaganda, quiet incursions—and sensed the strain in the conversations stitching allies together.

In Tel Aviv that night, we gathered in Habima Square holding candles and anger in equal measure. We demanded a real state commission into the failures surrounding the October 7 attacks, rejecting a government-appointed panel we felt was designed to protect the powerful. Our signs shook as we chanted for transparency, for accountability, for something more honest than the war still burning beyond the headlines.

Elsewhere, we scattered ourselves like sparks: at a Venezuelan militia oath ceremony in Petare, at a lone protest outside the White House while the USS Gerald R. Ford sailed into the Caribbean, at a Haitian funeral after a landslide stirred by Hurricane Melissa. In Argentina, two dogs watched the tide with us. In Seoul, drones stitched neon myths over the Han River. In Turin, we swung a racket with Carlos Alcaraz under stadium lights, just for the clarity of the moment.