ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE
by Louise Erdrich
Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
(full poem available at https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/13/louise-erdrich-resistance/)
The Soul Matters Theme for January 2026 is “practicing resistance.” In her poem on resistance, Louise Erdrich urges her readers to “resist being consumed” among a variety of other efforts of resistance. For me, this is the foundation of resistance. To have the capacity to draw psychic lines about where I will apply myself, my energies, my passions, my experience. While I know that I will be called into many different challenges and situations, it is not so much the call itself, but the ability to respond without losing what makes that response possible, that forms the heart of resistance as a spiritual discipline and life stance.
January seems an opportune time, one of new beginnings, amidst a world that continues to call us deeper indoors and into ourselves, to shelter from the cold, to contemplate the ways we will offer ourselves to a world, so often bruised and hurting, that does not make us a product of that which continues to bruise and hurt.
Blessings,
Aaron