| Some lives help us understand what love looks like when it is lived with courage, intellect, and integrity across a lifetime. The life of Pauli Murray offers such a teaching. Not because it was easy or linear, but because it was faithful to the long work of human dignity. In celebration of Black History Month, I honor the life of Pauli Murray and countless other Black visionaries. Born in 1910, Murray came of age amid profound loss and injustice. Orphaned young and raised by family in Durham, North Carolina, they learned early how deeply systems shape individual lives. From these beginnings emerged a person who would became a legal scholar, civil rights strategist, poet, activist, teacher, and Episcopal priest. These were not separate identities, but expressions of a single moral calling. Murray was a pioneer on many fronts. They were the first Black person to earn a Doctor of the Science of Law degree from Yale Law School. Their legal thinking helped shape the arguments used by Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality. Murray’s advocacy later informed Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s work challenging discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Murray also coined the term “Jane Crow” to name the intertwined realities of racial and gender discrimination, offering language that would later become foundational to feminist and civil rights thought. Yet what makes this life especially compelling is not only what was accomplished, but how Murray remained engaged even when recognition was delayed or denied. Their writing, including Proud Shoes and Song in a Weary Throat, reveals a life lived in honest relationship with struggle, disappointment, faith, and hope. Poetry and prose became places to tell the truth when institutions fell short. Law became a tool for imagining a more just society. Faith, later in life, became a way to hold love and justice together without collapsing one into the other. In 1977, Murray became the first Black and female-bodied person to be ordained an Episcopal priest in the United States, offering yet another expression of a life committed to wholeness. This step did not represent a departure from justice work, but a deepening of it. Love, in this understanding, was not passive or private. It was disciplined, attentive, and willing to remain present to suffering without turning away. As we move through February, often named as a month of love, Murray’s life invites a broader reflection. Love as steadiness. Love as moral clarity. Love as the courage to live an undivided life in a divided world. This is not love as sentiment, but love as commitment—to truth, to dignity, and to the ongoing work of becoming more fully human together. Perhaps the invitation offered here is simple and demanding at once: to consider how our own lives might carry love not only in feeling, but in action, persistence, and care. To ask what it means to remain faithful to justice over time. And to remember that even when the work feels unfinished, lives lived with integrity leave a legacy that continue onward. Join me for these upcoming events. Space is limited.  Living An Ethic of Love – Celebrating Black Dharma Teachings New York Insight Meditation Center Weekdays, February 2–27, 2026 This month-long online Black Dharma teaching series, offered through New York Insight Meditation Center, brings together Black dharma teachers for daily prerecorded teachings throughout Black History Month. Living an Ethic of Love explores resilience, ethical clarity, and care through contemplative practice rooted in lived experience and ancestral wisdom. Participants receive one teaching each weekday, accessible for at least one year, and the series is open to people of all backgrounds and levels of experience. More details and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events…  Reclaiming Rest: Nourishing Practices to Renew and Restore Body, Mind, and Spirit March 1 @ 12:00 pm – March 8 @ 1:00 pm EST Wallingford, PA, just outside Philadelphia, PA Many of us are stretched thin by constant demands and the belief that rest must be earned. This retreat offers space to step out of overwork and reconnect with practices that restore balance, ease, and purpose. Drawing on the Plum Village tradition, teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh and Parker Palmer, and the Courage & Renewal® approach, participants will explore burnout, the role of rest in peacemaking and social justice, and ways to realign with core values. Through mindful rest, embodied practices, and reflective dialogue, you’ll learn simple, practical tools to renew your energy and move through life with greater clarity. More details and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events/spring-term-pendle-hill/  THE MEASURE OF OUR HUMANITY: Actualizing Compassionate Action in These Tangled Times – TRANSFORMATION with Valerie Brown March 29, 2026 | By Donation Online Program Transformation invites us to slow down and meet ourselves and one another with care. In this online offering, Valerie Brown explores transformation as a relational and embodied practice, reflecting on moral worth and how values such as inclusion, belonging, dignity, justice, and courage are expressed through everyday choices. Through contemplation, reflection, and shared presence, participants are invited to reconnect with what truly matters and consider how inner change can guide compassionate action in the world. More details and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events…  Pilgrimage to Silence: A Nature-Based Retreat for Rest & Renewal Onsite at Hollyhock Retreat Center, Cortes Island, British Columbia Program begins May 17 at 6:30pm | Program ends May 22 at 1:30pm Book now and receive 10 percent off accommodation prices. Offer valid until February 15, 2026. This silent, nature-based retreat offers a peaceful space to slow down, breathe, and restore. Surrounded by Hollyhock’s forests and ocean, you’ll step away from daily noise and reconnect through Plum Village mindfulness, Quaker practice, and Courage & Renewal principles. With noble silence, time in nature, and guided meditation, this retreat supports healing, clarity, and renewed alignment with what matters most. More details and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events/pilgrimage-to-silence-a-nature-based-retreat-for-rest-renewal/  Geography of Change SOLD OUT AND WAITLISTED A Forest Retreat for Navigating Life Transitions with Valerie Brown On Campus | In Person May 29-31, 2026 Ben Lomond Quaker Retreat Center, Santa Cruz Mountains, Northern California Life transitions often ask us to slow down and listen more carefully to what is unfolding within us. Set among the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, this in-person retreat invites you to pause, reconnect with what matters most, and meet change with greater presence and care. Through embodied, contemplative, and creative practices, we will explore how inner clarity and self-trust can guide meaningful action during times of uncertainty. More details and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events…  Awakened Action What Blooms in the Ashes In Person & Online November 13–15, 2026 A gathering on Socially Engaged Buddhism exploring how beauty, mercy, and kinship can emerge amid brokenness, offered at Upaya Zen Center. Rooted in contemplative practice and shared inquiry, this gathering invites participants to reflect on how we meet suffering, injustice, and uncertainty with clarity, compassion, and care, and how our individual practice is shaped and sustained in community. Learn more and register: https://valeriebrown.us/events/awakened-action-what-blooms-in-the-ashes-in-person-2026/ Please consider supporting these extraordinary charities. Village of Love and Resistance (“VOLAR”) is a black and brown-led collective with more than 100 years of experience of living, working, worshiping, studying and playing, and praying in East Baltimore. VOLAR plans to renovate and transform a facility into a community and wellness center as well as rebuild and reinvest into the surrounding area through engagement of the people and implementing neighborhood development projects. Donate here: https://www.volar.site/donate Please support my friend Kaira Jewel Lingo and her partner, Father Adam Bucko, as they live into fulfilling their dream to build a spiritual and ecological community, a sanctuary of healing just 1.5 hours from New York City. Donate here: https://www.kairajewel.com/donate |
