Anne Deane: Aware With Words

19/02/2026

01/06/2025

"No one who has ever touched liberation could possibly want anything other than liberation for everyone." –Rev. angel Kyodo Williams

📷: Ole Kloth

Turn Word for the Day into a daily practice via https://grateful.org/wordfortheday

20/05/2025

I am one more voice that continues relentlessly to cry out against the current inhumanity.

My plea is for respect for human dignity, the preservation of life itself, basic needs for survival being met (food, shelter, clothing, safety), people thriving rather than just surviving, people having a sense of belonging through safe community, lands, culture and faith. My plea is for courageous compassionate communication, power “with” not power over.

Because I share the call for the bombing, killing and starving to stop doesn’t mean I don’t also call for prisoners to be released. And it doesnt mean I’m unaware of the historical intergenerational wretchedness of this situation.

We need to flip the talk. When conversations are reduced to the binary (one group vs another) it too easily feeds silence. This is a conversation about humanity itself.

Month after month, the world has watched as Israel treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.

Our damning report must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this genocide must stop. Act now ➡️ http://amn.st/6186Q8NgC

23/01/2025

Yes… the first 2 create little change in the way we operate in “the West” without the third.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1X5NEC3vF4/?mibextid=wwXIfr

I would like us to create peace at three levels and have each of us to know how to do it.

First, within ourselves. That is to know how we can be peaceful with ourselves when we’re less than perfect, for example. How we can learn from our limitations without blaming and punishing our self. If we can’t do that, I’m not too optimistic how we’re going to relate peacefully out in the world.

Second, between people. Nonviolent Communication training shows people how to create peace within themselves and at the same time how to create connections with other people that allows compassionate giving to take place naturally.

And third, in our social systems. To look out at the structures that we’ve created, the governmental structures and other structures, and to look at whether they support peaceful connections between us and if not, to transform those structures.

~ Marshall Rosenberg

Content courtesy PuddleDancer Press.

16/01/2025

Felt the need to take a big and long step back from social media and take time out to let my being sink into a much fuller appreciation of my place and that of those before me in the colonisation of so many peoples.

For me this continues to be taking time to sink into the deep listening and mourning and grief without which I believe it’s possible for me to get stuck in the understandable rage of activism but not have a clear vision of the world I wish to contribute to creating and choosing what that contribution is. (“Personal growth” with a cursory acknowledgement of the systems that drive disconnecting ways of being is no longer enough).

I’m appreciating the time to consider where I am blind to my own privilege in the work I do and how I do it. A confronting but so necessary path (for me). Yes, I realise it’s part of my privilege to take this time.

Here is one input into my current reflections that I’m finding very helpful. (Something about the cover was telling me this book would be heavy and daunting. It’s just the opposite… very alive and readable).

25/10/2024

I’m using FB less these days for my work. However, the article below broadened my historical perspective of what is happening in Palestine and beyond. Let me preface it by saying that I value human life, human dignity, basic needs for safety, shelter, water, food, clothing, community, connection, belonging and so much more … over differences in religion, culture, and ideology.

I care deeply for all people in this catastrophic conflict - be they Jewish people who have lost loved ones or don’t know where their loved ones are, Palestinians or Lebanese. My heart has broken open a thousand times and more as I see the destruction of life, property, culture and so much more in Gaza… I am mostly left speechless.

Yet, as a trainer in “nonviolent communication” I tell myself it is obscene to restrict the work I do to personal/interpersonal growth without anchoring the work in the systems in which we live. To focus on my needs and your needs when the system we operate in so often oppress others is to miss the point. When we seek to meet our own local needs at the expense of others in the wider global community we have missed the point.

I am not a specialist in what is happening in the Middle East and don’t pretend to be. And I know this article is one story among many. And - it’s an important story for me as the approach outlined is completely out of alignment with the values I believe enable humans to flourish.

The destructive force that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has unleashed in Gaza is rooted in a century-old ideology that says overwhelming power is how Israel should deal with Palestinians.

22/02/2024

Love is a choice. It is not wish-washy. It is a bold and powerful space of choosing to let go control and domination. It is resistance. It is acting on the belief that everybody’s needs matter.

It’s a commitment to ensure our fellow human beings basic needs for survival are met … nutritious food, water, shelter, safety, medical support … It’s a focus on now … this moment.

Once basic needs are met, love involves connecting… deep listening to stories, anger, pain, trauma … til we reach a place of shared mourning… and letting new ways of being arise from that meeting of hearts.

It is getting clear on each others needs and finding ways forward that each party can live with… in families, communities, work places and across country borders…

We can live life on the endless binary highway of good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, them/us … or we can choose to step across to the highway that focuses on needs: connection with family, health and well being, financial security, belonging and so much more…

Mural in Dubbo, NSW, Australia

05/01/2024

Yes… shift the narrative from keeping improving to just letting go of what gets in the way of being our best selves.

23/12/2023

Responding to War with Love.
What is needed to move out of cycles of violence and retaliation…? Check out this statement.

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