“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” —Mary Oliver, from the poem Invitation
Hello hello my friends! The other weekend I helped a house full of friends extend their dog fence. Once we let the three dogs out, it took them a while to understand the barrier they previously knew. We kept calling their names, urging them to step into a more expansive world. The smallest went to the original fence line and cautiously offered a paw into the grassy portal before pushing completely through with gusto. The permission he gave himself somehow became the permission he gave to the others and soon enough they were freer, too.
I understand my position is in a circumstantial stillness few currently have access to in the hustle under capitalism. I am consciously choosing to use this season to be in service. Primarily to my child and my mother, who also have their own pain and struggles, too. Living with others is it’s own kind of practice. Living with my mother and my child increases the repetitions I can practice communicating through differences with the ability to stay soft and in connection. I offer the data of my dramas and traumas if it helps you see anything that might relieve yours. Here is everything I heard myself saying to people I practice loving in these last few weeks. But first an update:
Good, bad, highs. lows. It’s all here. Three cheers for the human experience. One balancing act in my toolkit is kicking off the morning furiously dancing with mom as we belt out “and love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves!” I am in study about love and rage with two groups of beautiful people via book clubs, both starting out with clear agreements and clear definitions I will share with you. I’ve got a grapefruit womb until August so trying to show her my gratitude in the meantime. My sleeve caught fire on the stove and just as quickly snuffed out, so only time for awe. In a dance with insomnia, I heard birdsong at 2am. I spent a day showing an elementary school how to look and see. The three deer slept near the house last night. And all of this made me feel connected.
“When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” —Alexander Den Heijer
I’ve been enjoying watching Portrait Artist of the Year some nights. Artists from all different backgrounds with a variety of styles and mediums spend four hours creating a portrait. Struck by the process, I forget about the competition aspect. Someone on there told a story of a portrait artist who yelled “blue paper!” every ten minutes while painting. His wife would run in and hand him a piece of blue paper. He would read it, wad it up and toss it on the floor and like clockwork, ten minutes or so —demand another. Finally the sitter picked up one of the paper balls and read something like, “you are the greatest artist ever and you’re doing a great job.” I teared up. Writing feels like my thread to pull on from my little corner of the world but I can’t yet seem to detach myself from wanting the reassurance any of these words are resonating with any of you. I want to quit writing this newsletter every time I hit publish. And that just might be the vulnerability of creating, sharing one’s self. Discomfort has been a wise teacher I see my reach to avoid.
“How are you holding the brutality and beauty of this world, in this early spring?” Poetic words from a sweet friend, honoring what is. How do I hold this? How do any of us? In Latin, the suffix SPI refers to soul or breath and RITUAL meaning a ceremonial act. When I consider SPIRITUAL as an intentional ceremony of breathing, the spaces I find become less rigid. As I understand it, the narrative of white delusion has robbed us of our spirituality, of our rituals, kept us from true nature on purpose. I believe rituals are a way of supporting all this necessary change happening, containers we make to speak to ourselves, to usher it in. We all need places to connect with the higher self or sovereign spirit or heart center or knowing place, whatever the fuck you want to call it. It’s yours. It’s you. A check in with myself to reclaim my body, my life, my energy in tender care and presence with this being.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”—Viktor E Frankl
Frankly, I came to my interests in spiritual practice and emotional intelligence because I was desperate for a way to tend to the grief I was facing rather than hardening my heart to it or imprisoning myself by my reactionary state any more than I already am wired to. I’m convinced all of our reactions are in self protection, which I’m learning is a type of anger. Anger is a necessary human emotion. Those indoctrinated male are told it’s one of your only valid emotions and those indoctrinated female are told that while we are overly emotional, that anger is an emotion not meant for us. Few of us have been given tools to navigate anger or conflict in healthy ways. I have come to understand that anger turned inward is depression and anger turned outward is aggression. In reading Love & Rage, author Lama Rod Owens defines anger as “the mental and physical tension we experience between being emotionally hurt and determining a strategy of self care to tend to the hurt. The tension comes from the need to care for ourselves while also trying to figure out how to be safe.” I’ve been calling it “stickiness” but tension is such a good word for this.
In some ways it feels to me like the whole world is in a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response. The whole world includes me. Where am I today? In this moment? Am I doing a thing within my capacity, out of the will to nurture spiritual growth? Or am I doing a thing outside of my capacity, out of the need to be liked? What parts of this are actually me being victimized by something outside of my control ? What parts of this are me feeling victimized by pretty much anything outside of my control pointing me to some boundaries I need? How hot are my internal reactions? How hot are my external reactions with the people I love? With strangers? With my kid or my pet? With people with more power than me? With people with less power than me? It’s all information. Can I conjur a wiser version of myself to respond in this moment ? Can I find space to tend to my hurt? If life is a dance, domestic routines are like the dance of a whirling dervish, repetitive circles as a symbol of the planet orbiting the sun, chanting return to now, return to now, again and again. Always in practice and tested often.
Last week a kid brought a gun to M’s school, which went into lockdown—locking all the students in their classrooms. When I could finally go pick up M, the rituals that day were more about quietly comforting and recovering. I understand my regulated body can create safety for my child to process reactionary tension and to offer that, I am then led to simultaneously create safety for myself. Lama Rod further points out that if I am actually committed to harm reduction, then I also have an ethical responsibility to have a relationship with my hurt. And that everything has to be loved if I’m interested in getting free. Wise action can only be informed by feeling feelings, not assigning others responsibility to them.
And because you know I can’t NOT talk about recovering from codependency, since it has been a major tool to perpetuate the status quo that’s fucking us. Putting the onus of my emotional well being onto others drains me of my autonomy and power. I gain agency by practicing the pause. I often get feedback in my offline life that I have a calming presence, which means my nervous system regulation is showing. Breathing is regulating. Sometimes I find breathing by sleeping, by crying, by moving, or by being still. It’s free. I’m doing it anyway so it’s easy to connect to. I have a spiritual commitment to lead with curiosity. So asking myself questions and writing responses have been a good way to process through. What am I feeling? Where am I feeling it? Where is this reaction coming from? What do I need or what am I seeing I value here? How can I communicate about this? I try to offer myself compassion and self forgiveness, we are all learners. I have evidence this extends to others around me, who are mistake making humans trying to navigate a challenging internal and external world, too.
“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”—Ram Dass
Over twenty years ago I had a youth minister teach me a trick when I was socially anxious. “MH” stood for “mental hospital” so when he said it to me, it was a moment to drop in and consider that every other person present was a patient at a mental hospital that I was also a patient at. A great equalizer. This code, as well as interacting with all sorts of people throughout my life with varying abilities, backgrounds, wounds, and resources has provided some framework into how I have come to find the greatest hack for living with myself and others. Because we live in a traumatizing society, it isn’t too far fetched to assume we all have imperfections, blind spots, tragic coping strategies, and dysfunctional behaviors. If you aren’t feeling that in some way then you are living in a delusional bubble which is it’s own kind of mental illness, too so welcome, baby.
While I effort to hold wherever someone is at in compassionate understanding, I’m coming to recognize how individual concepts of power can keep us from love so it feels imperative to name here privileges that require some personal responsibility in case we are bypassing it. James Baldwin says if we really love each other, we have to make each other conscious of the things we don’t see. I do not want to skirt around an ongoing 200+ days of genocide that is becoming famine. Let’s not pretend all the ways we’ve been doing it is working for the majority just because it works for you. We are past due for some radical change. Our college students, protesting in camps across university lawns for Palestine, are pointing the way because solidarity is the only way forward.
Solidarity begins with community care. A great notion in theory but how are we actually practicing care in our communities? How are we cultivating community? How are we defining community? Or care for that matter? We are all new in practice and vulnerably confronting all we do not know. How do you hold people who don’t have the information you have? What do they need? What do you need to give it to them? What is worth sharing and how are you sharing it? What will grow here? What expansive existence might we find through this threshold into the unknown? Let’s consider the possibility that the people we are interacting with could be intentionally in your orbit with something to teach you and/or something to learn from you. The world needs people who can have conscious relationships, which requires some handle on your own patterns, shadows, trauma, etc. It also requires living out the values that keep you in right relationship with your true nature, other people, and the natural world. Which is a practice we have to practice together.
com·mu·ni·ty / kəˈmyo͞onədē/ noun
a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
care /ker/
noun
the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.
verb
feel concern or interest; attach importance to something.
Similar: concern oneself with, interest oneself in, give a damn
look after and provide for the needs of.
In the book Who is Wellness For? Fariha Roisin writes about how white people tell the story of a mythology of their own sanctity and bypass how capitalism makes us complacent. What am I living for? What is my money supporting? How can I redistribute money back into my community? Am I of the ~65% of Americans who can own a home, are currently employed, or are partnered? Am I of the ~40% who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck, could afford to travel or take a vacation, who would qualify my healthcare as good or even excellent? Where am I on the intersection of cisgendered, white, able bodied? In a world of solidarity, how do these things shape my responsibility to others? Can we name aloud the power dynamic this causes between us? What are my ongoing commitments to people with less than me? How am I actively valuing the emotional labor I benefit from? How am I demonstrating that I value care work? Who am I caring for?
In “All About Love”, author bell hooks has us looking at love as a transformative force, as a choice, and as a directional emphasis on social justice movements. She begins with a shared definition of love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” And to truly love requires a mix of ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honest communication. We are awakening to big truths about our responsibilities to ourselves and to each other within the constraints of this society. It is all practice. Stay gentle with yourself. Stay gentle with others.
