Keeping Each Other Alive

Good morning.

When I first heard the theme What’s at stake, I thought about crisis — the headlines, the smoke, that feeling that the world keeps ending. But when I let the question settle lower, into the ribs, it changed. It stopped shouting and began breathing.

What’s at stake lives in how we breathe through the losing. How we keep each other alive — in body, in memory, in breath.

We gather here in Tiohtià:ke, this island city colonially called Montréal, where the river holds its conversation with the sea. The Kanien’kehá:ka have called and cared for this place since before the measure of time, and still the river moves with their keeping.

If you stand at its edge in the early morning, when mist lifts off the St. Lawrence like smoke from a slow fire, you can smell the ocean far away. The same current that laps these docks once brushed the shores of Ghana, of Trinidad, of Nova Scotia. This water has carried so much — salt, sorrow, survival. It remembers even when we do not.

To live here is to live where rivers hold court with memory. And I’ve learned that the river always has something to say if you stand still long enough to listen.

When I walk by that water, I feel it remembering me. The wind catches in my chest the way it must have caught in theirs — those who crossed, those who tended, those who waited on a different shore. The ocean and the river are not symbols to me; they are witnesses. They hold what language tries to bury — the tremor in a hand, the grit of a long-dried tear, the weight of a glance over a shoulder — everything we thought was gone, still moving.

When I ask the river what’s at stake, it answers in layers: memory, sediment, and breath. Everything carried forward because someone refused to let it sink. The river teaches that what’s at stake is never abstract — it’s the remembering itself, the persistence of movement through loss.

Christina Sharpe tells us that we live in the wake. I feel that every time I pass the port. The air itself carries residue — of ships, of chains, of prayers that were never written down. The wake is not simply history; it’s weather. And I’m still learning how to live inside that weather without drowning in it.

The water keeps teaching: remember, and still move. Forgetting feels like stillness but pulls us under.

Cole Arthur Riley writes that there are truths the body remembers even when the mind forgets. I know that truth. My shoulders tighten when I hear sirens. My breath catches at the sound of a crowd shifting tone. Our bodies are archives of every crossing, every warning, every survival.

So when I ask what’s at stake here, in this body that remembers, I hear the pulse answer: the stakes are in the breath we keep taking, even when the air feels heavy. They’re in the trembling that refuses to disappear. Our bodies keep insisting that life itself is unfinished work.

So take a breath. Feel the cold of this river air in your lungs. That chill has moved through centuries of breath — through Indigenous keepers of this land, through enslaved ancestors who built the port, through migrants who came seeking rest. Their breath mingles with ours. The body is the shoreline where past and present meet. Justice begins in the diaphragm before it ever reaches the law.

Audre Lorde reminds us that caring for ourselves is a form of political warfare. I think of that every time I cook for someone grieving, every time I sit in silence with a friend who can’t find words. Care gathers what’s been shattered. It steadies the trembling hand. It chooses patience when anger wants to speak first.

And I think — what’s at stake when we care for each other this way? It’s more than comfort. It’s the memory of our own worth. It’s the refusal to abandon tenderness in a world that keeps demanding hardness. Every gesture of care interrupts despair. Every act of care is a way back into the current.

Our Jewish kin say in Pirkei Avot: it is not your duty to finish the work, neither are you free to desist from it. The river teaches the same thing. It keeps carving, returning, remaking. To care is to join that motion, to step into the current that refuses to stop.

Philippe Néméh-Nombré reminds us that to be Black in Montréal is to live in the shadow of the ocean. Even this far inland, salt lingers in the snow. The Atlantic hums through the pipes and the bones of the city. I feel that hum when I ride the metro at night, when the doors open and cold air rushes in — the memory of tides still breathing through concrete.

Every community that survives lives by a promise: to keep showing up, to tell the truth even when it trembles, to hold one another through the long dark. We break that promise sometimes, but we return to it, the way the tide returns to the shore.

The Qur’an says, whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved all of humankind. The Talmud says, whoever sustains a single life, it is as if they have sustained an entire world. Different tongues, one breath — both carrying the same rhythm of mercy.

And the Qur’an also says, weigh with justice and do not fall short in the measure. The river whispers this, too. Justice is balance — the quiet work of holding one another steady in the current.

Sometimes holiness is nothing more than breath shared between weary people. When the news is too loud, when grief hardens in the throat, the most radical act might be to exhale and know someone else is inhaling.

I think of February on the St. Lawrence — ice shifting, breath visible, water moving anyway. That is prayer.

The Qur’an tells of a moment when the Divine breath entered clay, and the clay remembered how to live. I think that breath has never stopped moving — through us, between us, through every mouth that still calls another name in love. Every breath, then, is borrowed holiness — an echo of that first divine exhale. Even when words fall away, breath keeps the prayer going.

Cole Arthur Riley writes, it is holy to weep, holy to rest, holy to be held. Holiness gathers in warmth built between bodies, in hands extended across the ache.

And when holiness feels far, I remember what’s at stake: not belief, but belonging. Not certainty, but the fragile thread that keeps us reaching for one another even when we can’t see the shore.

There are days when my own body is scraped thin from carrying too much, for too long. When another name appears on the news. When the apology comes before the grief has cooled. When the word solidarity tastes hollow, when every meeting feels like a funeral with snacks. There are days when I want to disappear — not out of fear, but because the grief has nowhere left to go.

And then there are days when grief turns to fire. When I want to shout until the sky opens. When I want the ground beneath boardrooms to tremble with the weight of what’s been silenced. When I am tired of sounding calm in a world that keeps burning. When exhaustion becomes anger, and anger becomes proof that something alive still refuses to die.

Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

That’s when I feel what’s truly at stake — the world’s capacity for feeling itself. The part of us that still flinches at injustice instead of adjusting to it. That flinch is holy. That fury keeps faith with what should have been protected all along.

And when the fire quiets, when the lungs remember how to fill again, there is the small miracle of return — the reaching for another hand, the weight shared, the breathing that steadies across two chests. Keeping each other alive means carrying the rage and the tenderness in turns, passing them back and forth until the tide shifts again.

So what’s at stake moves through all of this — the fragile, luminous us. The breath between bodies. The hands that build the table. The memory that refuses to fade.

We are descendants of those who crossed and those who tended. We are what the river carried and what the land still holds.

The Torah says, I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life. To choose life, in our time, is to keep choosing each other — to cook, to listen, to repair, to rest, to stay. That might mean checking on someone who’s gone quiet. It might mean making food, or sitting still, or saying, I’ve got you. Or I’m sorry.

When I ask one last time what’s at stake, I know now: it’s this. The persistence of care. The endurance of tenderness. The choice to live as if the river’s work is also ours.

So when you leave this space — when the air outside stings your skin and the city feels heavy — remember the river. Remember its persistence. When you hear sirens, when you see a neighbour fading from view, when exhaustion tempts you toward indifference — stop. Take a breath. Keep each other alive.

Our faiths, however we name them, meet in this place: in the river’s return, in the body’s remembering, in the breath that refuses to end with us. May we live like the river — carrying what has been lost without surrendering to it, meeting obstacle with movement, finding our way again and again toward one another. That is how we keep each other alive.

So take this breath with me. One deep inhale. One long exhale.

Let it carry the ache. Let it keep us soft. And let it be a way back to each other.