Veryl and Vivi (2025)

This is a story of gratitude I owe towards Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) for catalyzing a healing journey reintegrating me into a larger web of life. I joined SELC back in August 2023. Though I had been infatuated with SELC for years, and in fact incorporated Janelle Orsi’s Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy book into my curriculum as a teaching fellow at the University of Baltimore, my decision to apply to work at SELC was primarily motivated by fear. A couple years before, I’d relocated from Baltimore to the Bay Area to begin working as a tenure-track law professor at Golden Gate University School of Law (GGU). By spring 2023, GGU was on the brink of financial collapse, and I needed an exit option. SELC’s open hiring announcement came at just the right time.

I did not anticipate that working at SELC would induce a total reexamination of my life. Worker self-direction is a complete paradigm shift from the hierarchical workplace environments I had experienced in my career before SELC – in law or otherwise. I had settled for a career in academia because I’d thought it would be substantially better than the public interest legal nonprofit world – a world in which I began my legal career. That experience had been punctuated by an unsuccessful unionization attempt among rank-and-file attorneys and staff from below. Against that context, academia seemingly offered autonomy from a traditional executive director (or other boss) breathing down my neck. Of the dozen schools that offered me a tenure-track position in 2020, I chose GGU – the lowest ranked school of the bunch – because of its historic record and mission of primarily serving students from first-generation and underrepresented backgrounds. The faculty who attended my job talk [1] seemed to unanimously support my radical scholarship agenda [2] – a far cry from the varied responses I’d received from other prospective law schools.

From the outset, though, GGU turned out to be a toxic workplace by design and intent. I quickly learned that the faculty who attended my job talk were self-selected, and that a conservative minority were working to sabotage my tenure process because they disagreed with my hire. At GGU, junior faculty are subjected to an annual pre-tenure retention vote. During my first year, no less than five different faculty members and deans sat in my classroom to evaluate my teaching – including members of the conservative wing who chose to attend only part of my class and write damning assessments in bad faith. I lived with unrelenting anxiety. After surviving a contentious retention vote, signs of financial insecurity for the school began to surface. During this period, I was deceived by allied faculty members – institutionalists who reassured me that these signs were nothing extraordinary and that GGU had weathered similar storms throughout the decades of its storied existence. The biggest deception turned out to be from the dean, who sold me the vision that I would be the face of the university’s resurgence once the storm inevitably calmed. I had an offer to return home to the University of Baltimore, but the appeal of this vision and to my loyalty struck a chord. Little did I know that while feeding me this false vision, he was actively searching for other deanships; and, as soon as the first offer came his way, he made his swift exit. [3]

Academia was no panacea after all. Like the public interest legal nonprofit world before, it too reinforced the notion that ego was at the center of the movement lawyering industry.[4] Lessons learned in academia included these: My deep connections to grassroots communities as an organizer were irrelevant if I could not commodify those connections for academic publication. My impact on training the next generation of liberation lawyers was irrelevant if I did not receive an overwhelming positive evaluation from all my students. My advocacy for more racial justice curricular offerings and anti-racist policies were counterintuitive for other faculty members who had built the institution in its vapid form, sapped of rigorous critical inquiry. To adapt to this environment, I compromised my integrity and constructed a public persona that was geared towards accolades, recognition, and status. And, up until SELC, this way of being – this modality of life – had reaped many a success. But in the course of perfecting my performance, I had lost the ability to check in with myself, and live out my values.

Restoring My Humanity through Worker Self-Direction

I experienced the culture shock of worker self-direction at SELC from the day I started. My coworkers have shown me that movement lawyers do exist – not as this generation’s civil rights attorneys or self-adulating woke intelligentsia who put their own legacies (and litigation) ahead of liberation – but by living into liberatory values within the workplace and beyond with our partners. SELC has felt like a home, rather than a workplace, precisely because we operate as a collective where each member expresses commitment to each other and towards a larger horizon of an anti-capitalist future. [5] Yes, we may have disagreements (and sometimes they get messy), but our shared commitment means putting in the difficult work to arrive at a resolution that feels acceptable to all of us. To arrive at resolution, we engage in active listening, and uncomfortable, but careful truth-telling focused on understanding why each of us feels the way we do about any given issue.

We select clients based on similar values and/or forms of organization, and strive for a relational – rather than transactional – relationship where we co-create, co-learn, and co-build towards a future where all of us can thrive. SELC has shown me that it is possible, then, to practice alignment while living under capitalism.

In this culture of alignment, I have been encouraged by coworkers to work on and introduce projects that feel personally aligned with my interests. This is a vastly different way of orienting to work (and for me, has in fact largely collapsed the distinction between work and life - especially since we play a lot together too!). How amazing is it to spend time on the ground engaging in sweeps defense and mutual aid organizing as part of my work? Or to form political study groups around abolition and building beyond the nation-state?

Significantly, immersion in this work environment has invited more existential questions, like what is alignment for me? When do I feel aligned? Is it merely intellectual and theoretical, or can it be somatic and spiritual?

In contrast to academia, where active listening was detrimental to performing a carefully curated image of mastery, I have been learning to listen both to others and to myself with humility and openness. I have discovered that I feel most aligned when my body, mind, and spirit all feel at peace with a decision. But to make space for my body and spirit, I have had to minimize dependence on my mind and unlearn the heady habits and tendencies that have made me a successful, upwardly-mobile laborer under capitalism (or a model minority under racial capitalism).

In hindsight, though I’d ignored it, my body had been telling me all along that my singular focus on the mind would come at great detriment to my physical health. The constant state of anxiety as an academic - from the pressure to perform - had produced daily pounding headaches and, by late 2023, shingles – an excruciatingly painful experience.

At SELC, I am learning that taking care of myself is a good thing, and that I am only as effective as a collective member when I show up healthy. I have been encouraged by my coworkers to take more PTO, which I have found difficult to accept and have been slow to implement, as even non-teaching semesters as an academic are assessed for productivity as a researcher. Like Jordan dropping 38 in a flu game of the 1997 NBA Finals, I had been so programmed to work through illnesses. In stark contrast, at SELC retreats, we have regularly incorporated generative somatics, massage therapy, and movement exercises that have helped me retrain my focus from my mind to my body.

Reconnecting with Spirit

Our land-based clients have been central in restoring my connection to spirit. As a child, I was raised spiritually under the auspices of Christianity. Though it was a source of spiritual grounding, the evangelical bent of my Southern Baptist denomination paradoxically inculcated in me a spiteful, judgmental, and colonizing attitude towards non-believers. Recognizing this problem, I rejected Christianity, and for the past 20 years, turned to a heady scientific materialism that reduced all spirituality to religion, and all religion to the opiate of the masses. While this materialism – and more precisely, left radical-revolutionary traditions – in fact became my new religion, I lost my ability to feel into the love of the universe and connect to something vastly larger than my own thoughts.

Through SELC, I’ve had the honor of working closely with several land-based clients and, through our Sacred Legal Circles, loosely with over 40 Black and Indigenous groups across the nation seeking the return of ancestral lands. The cumulative effect of carefully listening to intimate stories of why a given land is sacred – as uncompromisingly told through alternate cosmologies that depart from Western registers of value and sentimentality – has moved me to a higher calling: to support the decommodification and rematriation of all lands and water on Mama Earth. I interpret this calling as the ancestor guardians of the land calling to me to heal the land, and in turn, be healed by Pachamama.

Through these clients, I’ve learned that ceremony is important to cultivate our spiritual connection with Mama Earth – and that rituals, prayers, and dances facilitate this deeper connection to ancestors who stewarded the land before us. Ceremony facilitates transcendence of the limits of capitalist time and reality. I feel this each time Corrina Gould from Sogorea Te’ says a prayer for the return of shellmounds, Homefulness residents from POOR Magazine offer a danza, and Chief Sisk from the Winnemem Wintu Tribe leads a prayer for the return of native Nur (salmon) to the Winnemem Waywaket (McCloud River), for salmon keeps the waters healthy, and water is life.

Through being invited to witness such ceremonies I become a participant in the ethereal flow of energy beyond the material realm – a return to spirit. And through this return, a restoration of a deeper connection to all land and life.

Unlearning Through Embodied Learning

As an academic, I routinely traveled to reap the rewards of recognition. Each speaking engagement further entrenched my image as a movement lawyer, and I used that to make new connections to leverage even grander opportunities that elevated my career. My ego ballooned to Babylonian heights as I gained love from students who sought to be my protégé and academics who cited my work.

With this much ego conditioning, letting go would not be easy. It has taken more than the containers of SELC and our local movement ecosystem to begin facilitating a transcendence. Fortunately, the flexibility of worker self-direction – to opt-into projects that allow me to work virtually – afforded me the ability to travel in pursuit of a call to embark on a journey centered on land. I'd realized that my ego feasted on urban life and its consumptive trappings, which separated me from feeling larger connections beyond my mind and immediate desires. I repeatedly heard our clients and guardian spirits pointing me towards land as the source of healing.

And so off I went to live on a farm in upstate New York for several months. And later an intentional community in Oregon. As an academic, lecturing was the modality of pedagogy, and books the modality of learning. I had accumulated all my knowledge – at least, knowledge relevant to capitalist success – in such fashion. The farm flipped my understanding of learning on its head – by quite literally shifting the focus from knowing in my head to experiencing through my body. The land was the teacher, and my body the repository of her lessons. I learned the basics of agroecological farming and agroforestry through putting my hands in the soil, by observing the limbs on trees, and breathing with the plants. The need to conform to rigid hourly schedules of capitalist time was replaced by slowing down to the seasonal rhythms of the land. I learned to confront my fear and discomfort – through, for example, being surrounded by constant death of plants and animals (including participating in chicken and turkey harvests), and staring at (and eventually composting) my own shit in a compost toilet. Most importantly, I learned through the abundance of the land as my provider – and through the multitude of human beings and dogs along my journey so far – that I am loveable, and I am capable of loving. Janelle, one of the guides along my journey, has left an indelible imprint on me to become more loving each year.

At Longhaul Farm in Garrison, NY (2024)

Practicing Alignment

If the early stretch of my journey has taught me how to feel into alignment, the next phase invites me to live into and practice alignment. How do I show up fully human – my mind, body, and spirit – even and especially in situations where I tend to practice avoidance or compromise my integrity?

Even in the safety of SELC, I feel a degree of timidness in some conversations. This is partially a result of healthily embracing a mentality of learning, growth, and humility. This openness has allowed me to recognize just how little I know about living. At the same time, though, my timidness is also a result of allowing external perceptions and stereotypes to define and paralyze me, avoiding discomfort and tension, and deferring to others as leaders instead of recognizing the value of my own ideas and contributions in co-ideation and co-creation.

I know that this next phase will be more challenging (as opposed to riding the waves), but the journey is supposed to take work. It will involve grappling with other human beings so we can become better together, and navigating through spaces that are openly hostile to non-Western modalities of life. I am so blessed to continue this beautiful journey of moving towards alignment. Thank you to SELC for opening up these possibilities. Gratitude to the universe for patiently unfolding and showing me the way.

Veryl and Janelle (2025)

Footnotes:

[1][^Jump back]A job talk is the name for the interview process for a tenure-track position at a university. It is a grueling process that involves multiple interviews with small groups of faculty members and leadership lasting an entire day (or two), with a formal presentation on a forthcoming publication in front of the entire faculty.

[2][^Jump back] See, for example, my law review article on the George Floyd rebellion, arguing that the destruction and seizure of property by grassroots movement actors prefigure a new relationship to property.

[3][^Jump back] Once the writing was on the wall, I reached out to the University of Baltimore once again, trusting that my former faculty colleagues there would sympathetically re-extend a lifeboat (even though I had initially chosen loyalty to GGU). After all, I had given every ounce I had to the institution for three academic years, including voluntarily designing and teaching a course on movement lawyering to placate student demands in 2020 for more progressive course offerings. But oh, how the tides turn! When I pled for rescue, the dean at Baltimore instead emphatically stated that I should have known better and that there was no longer any offer on the table because I had burned bridges with my original rejection. This is yet another example of the brutal politics of academia.

[4][^Jump back] Indigenous land activist Klee Benally situates the egocentrism of academia within settler colonialism and capitalism: “It’s plain that coercion and control are the foundations of institutions that perpetuate colonial social order and knowledge production. This is why ‘decolonizing academia’ is a fallacy. Writing indigenous knowledge systems into Western academic frameworks (aka 'Indigenizing’) is a form of pedagogical syncretism that makes greater careers for Indigenous academics (Who else could specialize?) while implicitly preferencing and furthering capitalist modes of knowledge sharing.” Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender at 29 (2023).

[5][^Jump back] One such imaginative vision of an anti-capitalist futurity is captured in M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, describing a new social order out of the collapse of global capitalism.