EXCELLENT — Cristina Breshears: Finding Ways To Close the Distance Between Us

So beautifully, wisely, and compassionately said. Deepest gratitude to Cristina Breshears. 🙏💜 Molly

I’ve been sitting with the reaction to that image of Trump depicted as Jesus and the way it seems to have unsettled parts of his religious base in a way so many other things have not.

And I keep coming back to the same quiet question: Why this particular image and not so many others? I’m not asking in anger. Not even in disbelief, exactly. More like… curiosity tinged with grief?

Because I think about the children in detention. The families separated. The people picked up at clinics, at work, during their court appointments, and in the middle of ordinary life.

And I can’t align those violent ICE interactions with “welcome the foreigner.” I read about school lunch funding, SNAP benefits, and food pantry monies being cut, and I can’t reconcile those actions with “feed the hungry.”

How do I make sense of removing healthcare from 1.6 to 1.9 million Americans who’ve already lost Medicaid coverage with “caring for the sick?”

Those are people and not mere abstractions to me. It’s no longer debatable. It just… is. Real people harmed by this administration.

I understand not everyone has had to cross that threshold where something stops being a story and becomes an assault to your soul. And maybe that safe distance some folks have managed to maintain has allowed them to keep from feeling all of this. But this current uproar shows symbols still work over distance and through detachment. How is it we can be moved by a digital image and not by the flesh and blood in our news feeds.

It’s amazing how symbols don’t require proximity. They arrive fully formed. Immediate and undeniable. Symbols act as powerful cognitive tools that transcend physical space and function as immediate, fully formed signals that convey complex meanings without requiring close proximity. They arrive in the mind as ready-made concepts, often triggering instant, undeniable interpretations that bypass slow logical reasoning. An image like this, of a man placing himself in the position of something sacred, it doesn’t need context or explanation. It just smacks hard.

But actual harm is different. Harm travels through distance if we aren't directly impacted. It travels through headlines and counter-headlines. Through numbers that grow so large they begin not to make sense anymore. And somewhere along the way, the most real things (the lives, the bodies, the quiet, human consequences) become the hardest to feel. So often, if we haven’t experienced the harm ourselves or know someone else who has, we don’t relate. We can keep that harm in abstraction.

This is the strange inversion that I’m wrestling with today. That an image can feel more concrete than a person. That a symbol can provoke outrage where suffering does not. Is it easier? Less costly? What do you think of this upside down moment?

And yet… maybe it’s not as strange as it feels. Maybe it’s just human. We respond first to what we can see clearly. To what touches something sacred inside us. To what doesn’t ask us to imagine across distance.

So I find myself wondering (not accusing, just wondering) if something in that image feels to you like it crosses a line… what is that line made of? Reverence? Humility? Truth? A sense that some things should not be claimed or taken or performed?

And if those things matter (and I believe they do) where else might they matter, too? Not just in images. But in actions. In policies. In the way we hold power over other human lives.

I don’t want this to be about catching anyone in contradiction. I think it’s about noticing how we notice. Because maybe the same part of us that recoils at a symbol being disabused is the part that could also recognize harm in an actual person if that humanity were brought close enough to see. And maybe the work — our quiet, slow, human work — is finding ways to close that distance.

— Cristina Breshears

*****

(I responded to Cristina's inquires with more of my own related reflections here: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2026/04/reflections-on-extending-light-of.html.)

Reflections On Extending the Light of Consciousness, Compassion, Wisdom, and Love In Dark Times

All photos are by Molly

 How Do We Keep Our Hearts Open

In Traumatic Times?

So many of us are struggling right now. We struggle with trying to make sense of the ever growing and chronic extreme chaos and violence, with keeping our minds and our hearts open, with understanding and not severing connections with loved ones who have such different perceptions and beliefs from our own, and with holding with compassion the enormity of the suffering in our nation, in our world, and in our own hearts and those we love and care about.

These are truly extraordinary times. I could not have imagined — at least not before installing a malignant narcissist in the White House — any President who would be openly threatening a whole nation with total and complete annihilation. Millions of us worldwide are horrified!

And I deeply resonate with these words of a longtime activist immigrant friend of mine in response to Trump's horrific and truly insane threats to Iran. My friend wrote: “This should be a day of self-reflection for the entire country. The fact that this nation produced someone who is willing to casually threaten genocide and that there are no institutional checks to this should be an indictment of the entire power structure. All of it. I feel a sense of contact shame for even being associated with the US right now.”

* * * * *

We Need to Embody Fierce Love

The one thing I know in my deepest being is that we need each other. We cannot live through these traumatic times in isolation and hope to sustain the strong connection with the wisdom of our hearts needed to not lose ourselves. We need the human support of those around and beyond us who truly get the horrors we are enduring and witnessing and who are courageously responding with wisdom and integrity rather than blindly adding to the harm. We need to be firmly rooted in our spiritual paths. We need to embody fierce love.

And this can be especially hard — and especially when the pull can be strong to return damning judgment, dehumanization, and hatred with more of the same. Millions are wrestling with this — how to respond and not react, how to embody wise speech and wise actions, and how to not be pulled into adding to the dangerous delusions and divisions which are so incredibly prolific in America today.

Pervasive violence and the delusions that they are rooted in is also not something new to our nation. What comes to me are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. that he made in 1967 exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own Government, I can not be Silent."

How do we not be silent while also not adding to the violence, both subtle or blatant, in our relationships, our communities, our nation, and beyond? How do we not hate and dehumanize those who inflict hatred and suffering onto others? 

I've been asking these questions for a long time now. And one thing that comes to me is how vitally important it is to understand the perpetrators of violence. This has certainly been true for me beginning with understanding the violence of my once malignantly narcissistic mother whose mental illness played such a large role in the suicide of my twin brother many years ago. I needed to understand, not condone, but understand the roots of my mother's illness in order to free myself from the poisons of bitterness, rage, hatred, and delusion.

This cleansing, this conscious awareness, this healing and transformation, and this depth of understanding of generational and cultural trauma is something that I believe we humans deeply need as individuals and collectively. I wrote about peeling back the fog of our ignorance related to the roots of authoritarianism in this piece: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2026/01/reflections-on-roots-of-authoritarianism.html. There are so many layers...

* * * * *

May Our Light Be What We Bring 

To Our World

Many years ago I was part of a women’s group who visited a newly opened facility in Portland whose commitment was to empowering women who’d been street workers to get off the streets. And Sister Cathy’s words will always stay with me. She spoke of the one thing that was needed more than anything else: “To be a heart with ears.”

And that is what is so deeply needed — to be hearts with ears, to be connected with the wisdom of our hearts, to increasingly live with undefended hearts.

Anyone who has absorbed a great deal of ancestral and cultural trauma, and who isn't embracing and healing and unburdening those legacy burdens in an ongoing way, will have a very difficult time opening to truly seeing the pain and suffering of others. Our inner resistance is mirrored in our outer resistance.

Creating safe spaces to heal our individual and collective trauma is so deeply needed. And this healing and growing consciousness begins with each and every one of us. I need to emphasize that without understanding our own deeper painful beliefs and experiences and wounding, and holding ourselves with compassion, we cannot be available to understand others and the pain they are often tragically stuck in. And without that awareness, we are much more vulnerable and likely to return the disconnection we witness in others with their own hearts with a disconnection with our own.

So many are asking "how can they keep supporting ___________ (fill in the blank)?" To countless humans, it is abundantly clear that great harm and trauma and violence is being inflicted on our human sisters and brothers and nonhuman planetary relatives and the Earth herself. We ask ourselves how anyone can still not see the genocide in Gaza, the brutality of ICE and immigration practices and policies, the insanity of the Iran war, the Epstein files and the epidemics of misogyny, the continuous and catastrophic climate crises, and on and on. 

The answers that I have found in this devastating individual and collective blindness were first discovered in the depths of my own ignorance, indoctrination, and illusions. So humbling, so humbling...

And out of this recognition and taking ownership and responsibility to passionately seek what needs healing within myself, I've come to compassionately understand both the obstacles to our awakening and also a sacred path of heart. Because haven't we all been impacted by the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy that has been with us since the earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples? We have.

For those of us who have been profoundly blessed with rooting into a path of awakening from our illusions, it is the consciousness and the fierce love embodied in our Light that is so vital to the well-being of us all. May this compassion and kindness, this Love, this Light be what we offer to each other and our world.

Bless us all, no exceptions,

🙏💜

Molly

INSPIRING! — Democracy Won In Hungary. Here's What It Took.

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