A VIGIL FOR PALESTINE - Outdoor Screening of Where Olive Trees Weep

🍉 I want to invite you to a community vigil for Palestine and outdoor movie screening.

The Palestinian struggle is not distant. It is interconnected with every colonized land, every community that has been displaced, every lineage that has carried trauma and resilience across generations. For those of us committed to ancestral remembrance and holistic healing, the call to stand with Palestine is inseparable from our call to heal.

This vigil creates a container where grief becomes medicine, poetry and song become tools of resilience, and where community can rise into solidarity. By holding this event in Los Angeles, we honor our interconnected struggles and declare: justice is a collective practice. Healing is resistance. Silence is not an option.

I am from Ecuador, a land also colonized, where extraction and erasure have tried to silence our original ways of knowing. I carry in my body the memory of the mountains and the wound of its invasions.

On this special evening we will be screening:

Where Olive Trees Weep

A searing documentary that brings forward the voices of Palestinians living under occupation. It weaves together stories of survival, ancestral memory, and the unyielding fight for dignity and land. It is a call to move from awareness into action.

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We are so honored to be joined by Dr. Jaiya John and potentially local activist and panelists from the filmmaking team. Together, we will weave story, discussion, poetry, and song into a living act of solidarity.

is an internationally recognized freedom worker, poet, author, speaker, and educator, whose own life began on the high desert of ancestral Pueblo and Anasazi lands in New Mexico. He is the founder of Soul Water Rising, a global "rehumanizing mission" dedicated to dismantling oppression through storytelling, healing, and social transformation, and the visionary behind The Gathering, a movement reviving traditional community rituals for collective liberation. With a Ph.D. in social psychology and a career as a professor at Howard University, Dr. John’s work spans academia, literary healing, and grassroots outreach; he is the author of landmark books such as Daughter Drink This Water, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution, and We Birth Freedom at Dawn, and the creator of the podcast I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John. Through Soul Water Rising, he has donated thousands of books and created scholarships, supporting vulnerable and displaced youth while giving voice and medicine to those working toward justice and belonging

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Joshua Tree - Eye of the Desert, 2848 Sage Ave. Yucca Valley, CA 92284, Yucca Valley, United States