I’ve been feeling overwhelmed this last month. It might be that February has this quality for me of a swollen bud. The inertia of the new year starts to press out and I find my body, my ideas, and my impatience all starting to swell uncomfortably wanting to be in the flower stage but instead rangling with the becoming that is being a bud.
Or maybe it is that here we are are again at election year and the fatigue I feel for both candidates is immense and engulfing.
Or maybe it is the fact that the sheer quantity of illnesses and my own precious and tenuous body has found me and my family sick more of the time than healthy for more than two years. And somehow, in the cloudy quality of sick, tending the blue light of my phone falsely promises to lead me home but takes me somewhere else where I wonder about hope, sanity, and how humans can inflict so much pain on each other.
I don’t know. The truth is, the fact finding part is not so important. What feels important in that is a call for aliveness. A longing. A reconciliation with action, purpose, and love in the context of a messy life that doesn’t resolve neatly.
In that I am hungry and curious for what is right action, right alignment, and right effort.
Every day the loudest of the calls from the newspapers and the socials scream at us. Don’t look away. Don’t look away while the myriad court cases play out to deem whether Trump crossed some line or the other, while we know he crossed them. Don’t look away as the Superbowl and its inane off field drama unfolds. Don’t look away as the house and senate send unimaginable amounts of money to buy weapons to support a regime that has methodically decimated city after city, life after life. Recently, it explicitly calls for action as the world holds witness to a horrific unfolding genocide in Gaza.
So knowing this, what do we do? How do we find and commit to action? To right alignment while it all screams, shouts, and kicks for more attention.
First I want to recognize that action is needed. We need deep unwavering commitment to imagining, building, maintaining, dismantling, supporting, and tending. Find some things to do and do them. Make your calls. Organize your workplace. Show up at those city hall meetings. Watch your neighbors kids while they do those things. Bring food. Give money. Those actions matter.
And also know we are in this living in the service of liberation for the long game. Find some commitments to movement that speak to you in a deeper more durational way. Let them become part of your life that exists like drinking water. Let it grow big and wide, let it be huge when the moments of life allow. Let it change to fit during those stretches where your life inevitably doesn’t have much extra room. Let it change how you imagine change. How you imagine yourself. Let the commitment to liberation be a love story and let it find you unrecognizable and illegible even to yourself.
This is the place to begin and to begin again. And again. And again. It is practice. Service. Devotion. And there are thousands of ways to live this life.
Now, back to the attention part. The screaming. The ongoing emergency. Is it an emergency? Yes absolutely. But my question is about poison in the emergency. Can we take this right alignment? This action, this abiding commitment I wrote about above and use our discernment to not poison ourselves.
Can we make our calls? Can we show up to actions? Can we be present with our families? Can we send money? Can we feel and look enough to witness but not so much we are engulfed in paralysis, poisoned by the too muchness?
Can we do this together out of love? Can we feed ourselves sky? Trees? And migrating birds? If we are somewhere where this is not possible, can those who are fed this way share the nourishment in their prayers, dreams, and privilege of kisses that taste like breakfast?
I don’t know for sure, but I am trying. And as far as I can tell the hawks building their nest in the eucalyptus that has a long complex history are too.
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Listening to:
andre 3000 with everyone else and loving every minute
Paying attention to:
the flowering quince
the organizing here