Incantation for Liberatory Grief
A living spell of Holly’s values and commitments
This is an incantation of values, commitments, and protections for every space I co-tend. This was created after being fired from teaching a grief module for naming the genocide in Palestine. Putting this out so directly carries risk, especially in a field where many remain silent or intentionally ambiguous about the political and systemic realities shaping this moment. And still, it feels necessary in a time when we are being deliberately misinformed and disoriented every day. Nuance is not neutrality.
This is a living document, it will evolve as I do. May it offer fierce clarity about who I am, what my soul is devoted to, and what I will protect in the spaces I help create.
I’m Holly Truhlar (they/she), a white, queer, working-class community organizer and donkey enthusiast. I’m a two-time sibling loss survivor, deeply shaped by loss, interspecies friendship, and a Bohemian lineage of resistance. My work grows from the lived experience of making meaning and tending grief amid the unraveling of empire in the so-called United States.
Living within the belly of empire, I carry a particular responsibility to name its harms, refuse imperialist logics, and help crumble it from the inside. Not through performance or theory, but through presence and devotion to soul, grief, community, and collective liberation.
From this ground, I practice as a collapse psychologist, politicized grief tender, soul activist, and conflict mediator—co-creating spaces of belonging, beauty, communal care, and cultural repair. Every class, workshop, and ritual I offer is meant to dis-spell the myths of supremacy and individualism, and call us back into connection: with each other, our Ancestors, and the beyond-human world.
All grief is political, and I do not separate any of my work from this reality. In this moment of unraveling, most of our grief lives downstream from global systems of domination including colonization, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, sanism, cis-heteropatriarchy, and human supremacy. Part of our work now is to build the capacity to acknowledge the harms we’re complicit in and recognize the mutuality of our suffering and grief.
Grief is not pathology; it’s essential soul medicine for this time of collective initiation. It’s a holy and natural response to life and loss, especially in an overculture that demands we stay productive and severs us from soul, ancestral memory, and our bodies. Grief is the soul’s protest against the brutality of empire and the rupture of our living relationship with the Dreaming Earth.
My work is most influenced by Bohemian resistance, Black feminist thought, Indigenous sovereignty movements, abolitionist imagination, crip and disabled artists, archetypal psychology, neuroqueer perspectives and practices, and interspecies kinship. It’s rooted in the long memory of beings who’ve refused domination across generations and geographies. These lineages remind me that grief and soul work aren’t only soft, they are also fierce acts of defiance.
The spaces I shape are explicitly liberationist, animist, decolonial, anti-Zionist, and COVID-cautious. Expressions of supremacy—like anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, anti-transness, anti-Semitism, Zionism, ableism, or misogyny—will not be normalized. Harmful words or actions will be care-fully named and interrupted whenever I notice them, and as consistently as I’m able.
When we’re together, mistakes aren’t just allowed, they’re expected and welcomed, including from me. Hurt and rupture are part of any relational field, especially one rooted in truth, transformation, and love. What matters most is how we come back to our dignity, practice compassionate accountability, move toward repair, and grieve together.
In spaces I’m a part of, we do not cancel or dispose of people. We stay, when we’re able. We minimize harm and tend to the mess when possible. We remember that rupture is part of relationship, and repair is part of liberation, especially because it’s so often those in down-power positions, the most vulnerable, who are most impacted by untended conflict.
You don’t have to share all my values to practice with me, but my facilitation spaces will reflect them. I name what I see. I protect what’s sacred. I’m neuroqueer and direct, unapologetically centering liberation, grief, and communal care in this time of collapse and polycrisis.
I’m not here to be professional, respectable, or acceptable to Empire. I’m here to be skillful, relational, courageous, and liberatory for our communal well-being and the Future Ones. If you’re like-hearted, I hope you’ll join me.
May our grief be in service to soul, life, and collective liberation. May we build an underculture of care. May we all get free together. Free Palestine. And so it is.