“You are not alone across time.”

But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying ... See more

And so I think this is one of the reasons we, as a species, need the mediation of these stories — to create spaces where we can feel what it’s appropriate to feel and also acknowledge the complexity. We didn’t come to tie a bow on this and say that there’s a message. We came here to ask more questions and problematize it and interrogate it.

And that purpose was to communalize trauma, to create the conditions where — the word “amphitheater” in Greek means “the place where we go to see in both directions.” “Amphi-” — I see you, you see me; both directions. “Theatron” — the seeing place. So we go to the amphitheater in the fifth century, B.C., to see each other, to see ourselves; to see ... See more

And so how do we break these cycles of violence? I think the only way is to see ourselves as both/and, perpetrators and victims, and to look at that really closely and to say, the only way to break that cycle is to acknowledge the traumas and the wounds that inform and create the violence that we enact on others.

What I’ve seen, over the last 12 years of doing this work, is people discovering that by telling their story and sharing their narrative, no matter how hard it may be, they are helping other people, and in helping other people, they’re healing themselves. And that seems like a physical law of our universe, almost.

To sit together as a community and acknowledge the truth of war or the truth of addiction or the truth of domestic violence or the truth of COVID — inasmuch as it reduces our sense of isolation, and inasmuch as it’s able to put into words, grammar, and syntax things that we thought only we had ever thought, let alone ever expressed, I think it can ... See more

I heard this quote that Elie Wiesel, actually, liked, of Hegel — that genuine tragedies are not conflicts between right and wrong, but conflicts between two rights. But I actually feel like the tragedy of our time is so many wounds, so many sufferings that can’t be equated, and yet they’re all so real. And we try to not address the suffering; we wa... See more