What Is Underneath by Danielle Speakman

ROOM 6.26, Poems

Danielle Speakman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. She is a graduate of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her enduring interest is in Jungian depth psychology, and she seeks to hold a therapeutic space where existential and spiritual questions are welcome. She views writing as a form of activism, love, empathy, and attention—essential to all that she does. She believes each of us has a part to play in the particular cosmos of our time. In these moments of helplessness, uncertainty, and war, poetry has become her way of reaching toward others, almost like passing someone a love note. She has been especially deepened by her doctoral work interviewing street children in Lima, Peru, which has continued to connect her to Latin America. She also practices and teaches yoga, which she believes keeps her honest, rooted in her body, and resistant to the pull of abstractions.

Photo by Paaz PG

Living Wisdom International High School — Afghanistan Program

Community Projects, ROOM 6.26

At the heart of EFL is a single, luminous idea: The overarching goal of the system is to help each student develop maturity—defined as “the ability to relate appropriately to realities other than one’s own.” And from that maturity flows something even more precious: true success, defined as the ability to face life’s challenges with joy, wisdom, and inner strength—creating a life that is both personally fulfilling and beneficial to others.

Photo by Mahmoud Hamdi

The Journey from the First Afghan Student to the First Afghan Teacher at Living Wisdom

Community Projects, ROOM 6.26

It was January 2023. Life in Afghanistan had become unbearably difficult for girls. For us, education was not just about books or classrooms. It was our only path to freedom, to dreams, to proving to our community that we too could build our country alongside our brothers. For me, school was more than a building; it was a sanctuary of hope. I dreamed of becoming a doctor, of healing the sick and giving families a reason to believe in tomorrow.

Activating Hope in Dark Times by Sahar Vardi

Essays

This is an argument based on faith that there is right and wrong—and that at some point things will be different. Faith that no occupation lasts forever, oppressed people eventually reach independence, and justice will prevail. Faith is hard to hold. Over years of activism, I have found that focusing on what we are able to achieve in our work has helped me hold on to hope.

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

Essays

The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.