Mini-Episode: Children as Sacred

This week’s mini episode is a love letter to children. Prentis reflects on how they are carrying the greatest weight of cruelty in our time—and why failing to protect them betrays our future. Prentis also shares an invocation to James Baldwin and borrows from his moral clarity to ask what it means to intervene when children are being harmed.

• Apply for the Becoming the People In-Person Training May 6-9th
• RSVP for the Being the ground: Toolkit for care and connection in crisis response webinar April 13th

Transcript

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Mini Episode - March-10-2026.mov

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Everybody welcome back to Becoming the People. I'm Prentis Hemphill and this is this week's mini episode. These episodes we kind of sandwich in between our guest episodes and it's really where I just share with you all what's on my heart, what's on my mind, what's going on for me this week, what I'm thinking about, what you said to me, all kinds of things. This is a space for processing and for sharing.

And I'm happy to be with you this week. It's been really a hell of a week. It's been a hell of a week. But I'm glad to be connecting with you all and just sending some love and connection to everybody out there.

Before I get into some of the content today, I really wanted to share a couple things that feel really exciting to me, which is One, you may have heard, you may have heard word on the street. We are, my organization, the other hat that I wear is that I co-founded and I co-direct an organization called the Embodiment Institute. For those of you who don't know, I'm a somatic practitioner. Maybe you don't know that.

Maybe you've never heard that. But I do somatics, I do embodiment work. I do trauma healing work and we are doing a big training this year May 6th through 9th out here in North Carolina where I live and the applications are open right now. If you go to the embodimentinstitute.org or if you go to our Instagram page or in the show notes hopefully of this show you will find a way to apply to the training that we're doing over there which is going to be I kind of deep dive into embodiment.

It's a transformational character training. So we are practicing how we live more aligned with our values and how we unlearn the things that maybe we've embodied over time that actually do not produce a just world, do not produce connection. And we're trying to learn together how to be who we intend to be, people that can show up for this time. It's Becoming the People.

I think the training, we actually called it the Becoming the People training, so you can join us there for practicing a lot of the principles that we're talking about here. The other thing that's coming up is April 13th, I think, we are, again, the Embodiment Institute is hosting a webinar that is open to everyone, but we're gonna be hearing from Frontline organizers the folks that are bringing together the healing and the organizing that are responding in this moment on the ground to crises that are happening Or bringing together the people that are really practicing to share what they're learning and share best practices and share their tools so on April 13th if you want to join us there, please do. There's so much brilliant organizing.

We have folks coming from LA, folks coming from Minneapolis, folks coming from all over that are going to share what they've been up to. So please join us there. Again, we should have more info in the show notes if you want. to check that out and show up.

We can be together. We can actually practice together. I wanna share more of those opportunities that we can really be together in person and not just here, which is a great way to be, but there's also times we can come together for other things and in other ways. This week, y'all, I can't even get into everything on this episode, obviously.

But one of the questions I'm always sitting with is, What are we embodying and what might we embody in this moment? What do we want to live into? Those are the big questions of becoming the people. How do we actually become those people?

Which leads me often down a lot of paths, thinking about and considering who we are, what we value, what our culture says about who we are. And so this week I was thinking a lot about Children. I think a lot about children because I'm a parent. I have a child.

I'm also a person that enjoys having children in my life, getting to know people who are younger than me. getting to know kids and listening to them. And my daughter said to me recently in a really earnest way, she was like, it's really hard being a kid because you adults have to tell you what to do. And I just been thinking about that a lot ever since.

And how do we not just treat children as small people that we instruct or control, but how we really start to see them as these really amazing full beings that have their own opinions, orientations, desires, gifts. And as adults, I think a lot of times we can forget that, you know, the joy of knowing a child is in meeting them and in learning to meet yourself again and delight and creativity and spontaneity. So you know, I had a whole conversation with her about how my intention was and what I hope to do as her parent was not just tell her what to do, but to kind of clue her in on what the world was about and give her some idea of where she might be more attentive or what there is to learn.

But I really wanted to guide her rather than control her. And so this is a conversation we've been in and what I'm trying to practice in my parenting. But my life, in a way, is really centered around this child. And I've been thinking about, really for the last few years, how much our culture doesn't seem to be centered around children at all.

And this is something I've been thinking about over the last few years. just not only how our culture is not centered around children but how our culture actually seems to be anti-children and to me therefore anti-the future. Therefore anti-what comes next and it's disturbing really when I look out at the world and it seems to be that children are bearing the greatest weight of the cruelty of this time. It's been years of bombing children in Palestine, years of starving children in Palestine.

Children are being tortured and killed in Sudan. we've been talking on this podcast and across this country in the last few weeks and months and years really about the Epstein files and the centrality of abuse, the ritualizing of abuse, by a certain class of people that control so much wealth and resources in the world, that this is, abuse is almost a pastime, or is a pastime in that world. And that tells us something about what they value and what they don't value.

And then this last week, the US and Israel launching this war against Iran, and the start of this war being the bombing of a girls' school, 168 girls, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 years old girls bombed. And that's the initiation of this war. That's how this war begins with the murder of children. And I just can't get over when I see all this, not even to mention school shootings in this country, years of school shootings.

where it seems as though officials sit on their hands when children are being killed. It's unfathomable to me that this is the way that we treat young people in this world, that they are the collateral of war, of violence, that our culture seems to detest children. to disregard them, certainly to objectify them, to control them, to kill them. It's our culture and then I think it's not only our culture, I think it's many cultures.

I think there's many places in the world where we have learned to turn away from the future. We've learned to turn away from possibility. And I think when I look at it, it seems rooted in a deep self-involvement, being unable to see outside of our individual selves, our individual lives. Because what a child compels you to do is create.

What a child compels you to do is nurture. to plant a seed, to think about what will grow beyond your life. There's a generosity in that kind of relationship. That kind of intergenerational relationship is all strung together by generosity, by thinking about planting something, thinking about involving yourself in a future through nurturing, through love.

I don't know what will come. I won't see what will come, but if I love you, If I hold you, if I look into your eyes, if I feed you, if I protect you, there's possibility. But there's something that we've lost. I'm not sure that we've had it.

And I certainly don't think that we've had it for every child here. I know that. But if we don't have an orientation to children, I think we've lost an orientation to the future. We've gotten so navel-gazing, so solipsistic, so focused on ourselves, and our greed, and our domination, and ultimately our small little lives.

that we've forgotten that core of generosity. We've forgotten that core of faith, almost. It's not even hope. You have faith.

You have faith. You pour into a child because you have faith. And because a child reminds you of all those things that a world that is just based on production does not value, the imagination, what you can't see, kind of what seems like aimless time, just wandering around. When I want, when I'm trying to get somewhere with my daughter, trying to go somewhere, I have to realize that she has no concept of time.

It's just what interests her, what moves her, what excites her, what frustrates her, what feels tragic in the moment. But there's no like, I gotta get here by nine o'clock. It doesn't matter. You realize that there's another dimension.

There's another way to be in our lives when you know a child. You can be much more motivated by interest, by awe, by wonder. There's so much lost to me. There's so much lost in this cruelty.

that I see us having towards children. There's so much loss. And while there may be people that imagine that there's something to gain, I have no doubt that it's empty. I have no doubt that it's empty of meaning, that it's empty of value, that it's the grasping of a lost soul.

I'm gonna switch gears here for a minute, because I wanted to share this piece that I wrote kind of around the same idea. I was invited to the Schomburg to read an invocation for James Baldwin. I didn't actually know what an invocation was, to be honest. I had to look it up.

And it basically was what I was going to do anyway. But I read this invocation for James Baldwin's, what would have been his 100th birthday at the Schomburg, which, y'all, if you know me, that's just like a dream come true for me. have considered myself James Baldwin's child probably since I was a teenager. I feel like he guides me, he guided me, he's taught me so many things as a imperfectly perfect genius prophet, writer.

He has taught me so much. So I got to write this piece and read it for him and the audience there. And so I want to share some of it because it is to my father, James Baldwin, but it's about children and some of what he had to say about children and our morality. Okay, starts with what Baldwin meant to me.

I haven't been brave enough to say too often out loud that my work in this different time, in a different context, in a different genre, answers to his. That I, Black like him, but Southern, differently queered, am born from him. He told me I could be myself. I could see what it is that I see.

And he insisted at the same time that I give up all my hand-wringing about it and get on with it. God, that part of you that formed yourself into James Baldwin is mighty. The constellation of passion and love that formed this brother saint that I long have called my own father was a part of you, God, that never turned away, that never clamored towards innocence, that never stopped short of describing the world's dissymmetry as it is, yet never let any of us off the hook, that seemed so courageously small and human in the face of his lying and depraved, monstrous kin.

I call back to that part of you, that Baldwin-shaped star. We need you now. It sometimes seems that we are born in the time just before we are most needed. Though I'm sure the world of a hundred years ago conjured you out of a necessity, we are left now in your wake with questions.

This world, it seems, is quite perversely committed to traumas and their proliferation. I know it is the denial of our feeling that allows this and pretends there are no consequences for it. I know it is a kind of pain paired with the forgetting that keeps it going. I know these things, but I know them more clearly when you say them.

I called my book What It Takes to Heal, and I stand behind the proposition that this world is in desperate need of healing, no matter how naive it seems. But the book, I realize, could have easily been called What It Takes to Change, What It Takes to Love, What It Takes, As You Taught Us, to Grow Up. We have not yet figured this out. It's a hard time now.

A pressurized, violent time. A careening kind of time. More than you know, but exactly as you prophesied. I'm thinking mostly about children.

When I was writing this, I opened up my copy of The Devil Finds Work to this page where you said, These people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the sanctity of human life or the conscience of the civilized world. There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world. It is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it, so that the vital interest of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the

child. If these are the metrics we have fallen profoundly short, I only need to turn on my phone to see a toddler's teeth chattering in Palestine from the shock of a bomb, or to see a child holding the hand of their mother dead on the hard ground of Darfur, or to see a child waiting in the swollen waters of Appalachia, to see a child running from the doors of their school, I was told somewhere else to keep scrolling, to not look too closely, to not cry too much for collateral. Children.

I am afraid we are becoming the monsters you warned us we might be, the ones we stuffed under our own beds. We retreated into our most fearful selves. We got trapped in our myths. We have relinquished our agency, deifying the most fallible and foolhardy because their certainty shields us from our terror.

There is a lot to be afraid of. We are a lot to be afraid of. but it is strangely our fear of ourselves, of our interiors, our bodies that keep us in this place. Our bodies show us time, show us change, emerge from each other's.

Our bodies get strong and decay, and yet we deny them their power. We think freedom is singular, bodiless, and not collective and organic. But I'm not hopeless because if I were, I would not write any more words. I would not try to say anything at all.

I would not look into the eyes of my child and I would not read Baldwin. I wanted to share that with you all today because I think every so-called solution that we might arrive at seems like it will emerge from what Baldwin said, from that kind of love of the child, of the future. the kind of love that has us center them, has us restructure everything around them, the kind of love that says that they are an answer to a question that we're asking, that they deserve our attention, that they deserve our care, and that anyone and any entity that would treat a child this way that would meet the beauty of a child's life with violence or abuse must be stopped by us.

So my invitation this week is for all of us to feel that. Feel that love of the child. It could be the love of the child in you, love of a child you know. Write a poem to the children that are suffering from the mistakes of the misguided right now.

Do something. I invite us all to do something. for the sake of that future. And that's it.

That's what I got today, friends. Wishing you all well, as well as we can be right now. Wishing you all love and tenderness. And yeah, we'll see you next week.

Thanks for listening. Becoming the People is produced by devon de Leña with special production support this season by Jasmine Stein. It's sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Our theme song was created by Mayyadda.

If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is you listen. And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon. Prentis Hemphill, we are having a great time over there building community, learning together. Come join us.

And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming a People. Becoming the people doom doom doom