life living through it

The iris are budding up outside and this morning on my walk I saw a field mouse scurry its’ way across the road stopping for breaks in the craters of old puddles.

I can smell the hawthorn trees when the sun shines and for the first time last week it smelled like that baked concrete of summer while I left the grocery store.

I found a new musician and am diving deep into his sounds. It feels like he makes worlds as he plays. And the way his hands touch the keyboard reminds me that we really are electric.

And as I write this I am actively not reading story after story, highlighting the excruciating detail of children, some who are the same age as my own being subjected to an unfathomable kind of violence.

I don’t know what to say about it. It sits sickly in my stomach as it happens again.

This is broken.

And it is systemic and our imaginations about this are also broken.

The desperation is real. The grief is real. The loneliness is real. The disconnection is real. These things are real and they are deadly in these kinds of horrific acts and also in the spike of overdose deaths that we have seen in the last few years.

Not only do we need drastically less access to guns, we radically need more access to care, safety, connection, and shared joy.

We need collective places that can hold pain and put us back together again.

I quickly realized this morning as I checked in on social media that I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t read post after post that performs some sort of stand in for what feels broken inside.

I needed to look outside and re-orient to life living through its beings. I needed to know that the anguish I feel is that also. That the pain is good sign, it means that it hurts and shocks. It means that we know life as it lives and we know when it feels wrong. Let’s heed those calls. Let’s feel them and let them move us toward action. Let’s move from the strength and imagination that we know and inhabit as our birthright.