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| Photo by Molly |
"When I finish giving speeches, during the question-and-answer period, people often ask if I think our system needs to fall apart before it can change. I believe we would be wise to accept recent events as symbols that things already have fallen apart. Action cannot wait any longer."
― John Perkins
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Mass shootings... again and again. The climate crisis. The pandemic. Endless wars. Systemic racism. Mass migration. Mass incarceration. Mass extinction. Mass misinformation. Poisonous propaganda. Polarization. Corrupted corporate owned mainstream media and political systems. A status quo rooted in a patriarchal, neoliberal, predatory capitalism. Late stage greed and the vast redistribution of wealth upwards. Crushing poverty and pervasive suffering and injustice. Rising authoritarianism and fascism. Add this and more onto whatever challenges that we are facing in our personal lives and is it any wonder that we all are not feeling overwhelmed?
Two days ago I was listening to an Alternative Radio interview by David Barsamian with Noam Chomsky. Paraphrasing Professor Chomsky, he stated that we are catapulting towards species extinction, that those in power are doing everything that they can to speed up this process, and that any beings from another planet observing what we humans are doing here on Earth would say that we are insane... which we are.
I mean, truly, people who commit monstrous acts do not fall from the sky. They don't. To have 18 year old kids committing mass shootings within days of each other is a reflection of the pure madness of American society and beyond. Just madness.
All around us we are seeing undeniable symptoms of the larger collapse that is happening now, here, in our times. Deep and pervasive collapse. And we did not get here overnight. It's like following the pathway of any addiction. There is an early stage, a middle stage, and a late stage.
We are late stage.
Late stage is the consequence of our collective failure to address, deeply address, the shadow side of our nation and all of its manifestations. And now we see children acting out this depth of profound pain and suffering and trauma by walking into a store or a school and killing as many people as they possibly can.
But who first killed the child within them?
Monsters do not fall from the sky. They are created through our neglect, our denial, our projections, our refusal to face what must be faced ― all that has forever needed to be faced in our nation and beyond. And owned, healed, transformed.
American exceptionalism is killing us. And ignorance, denial, fear, isolation and rugged individualism, separation and polarization, hatred and rage. It is all killing us. And it is killing life on this beloved planet that is our only home. We truly are hurling towards species extinction. And the suffering manifesting in horrors such as children killing children is but one symptom of a much, much larger picture.
That said, we do have choices. We do. And there is too much work to be done to sit down and be mired endlessly in hopelessness and despair. We have to get up. We cannot give up. We can't....
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| "People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do." ― Dorothy Day |
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| "This, my dear, is the greatest challenge of being alive: To witness the injustice of this world, and not allow it to consume our light." |
These
are truly difficult times with so much to hold and
grieve. Whether the eyes of our hearts are open or closed, we are still
impacted by this great suffering and trauma all around us. So how to cope with the ever increasing intensity of the ebb
and flow of the waves of horrors and heartbreaks that are washing over
and through us?
One thing that I know is that denial, a lack of truthful larger picture information, and chronic numbing will only drive us deeper into the closest distractions we can
grasp — any plethora of additions, being stuck in directing hatred and rage and blame onto those f*#!king _________ (fill in the blank), clinging to harmful belief systems and attachments, and other unhealthy and unhelpful coping patterns.
It is my belief that strengthening our capacity to hold both grief and gratitude is essential. And we cannot do this without a consistent and evolving practice of tending to our hearts and souls and those of one another.
We
all need each other. And we need to remember to find balancing and
grounding experiences within community and nourishing connections, within beauty and love, kindness and generosity and compassion, and within our
spiritual and creative practices and traditions.
And we need to grieve. Without grieving, our hearts will inevitably harden and distance us from our capacity for wisdom, discernment, generosity, courage, compassion, and love.
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” ― Francis Weller
"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." ― William Stafford
This is what we need to do together. Weave a parachute out of everything broken. Refuse to live numb and small. And, to the best of our ability and one day at a time, feel the pain and trauma of what we are witnessing and experiencing. Together we can allow our grief to strengthen our hearts, our consciousness, our actions, our capacity for fierce love.
We cannot do this alone. Together we can witness the injustice of this world and not allow it to consume our light. And together we can inspire each other and ACT in some way, whatever our part is, to bring healing to ourselves and our planetary sisters and brothers.
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| "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." ― Anais Nin |
It is time for us to tend to our hurting hearts in these traumatic times. It is time.
I say this with humility and with the awareness of the deep roots in soulful paths of heart that so many of us have long been on. And, if we are alive and breathing, there is more that we can embrace and deepen which nourishes our individual and collective hearts and souls while making more possible our evolution as a species.
First, and as I do every day, I invite us all to hold ourselves and each other. Right now, here, in this moment and beyond. To wrap our arms around ourselves, to hold one another... physically, in our hearts, in our prayers. To hold and be held with the deepest tenderness and compassionate acceptance of whatever it is that we are struggling with, feeling, needing. And to allow this holding to soften us, to break our hearts open, to simply be with the great sorrows of our times.
My experience has been that this tender holding, this compassionate allowing, this brave opening is what has strengthened my own heart again and again and again. This has been a significant part of what has helped me to grow and expand my capacity for healing, resilience, compassion, consciousness, and love.
And, my, how these times ask of us to bring greater and greater love, fierce love, to ourselves and life on Earth. Love is indeed the Great Medicine that is so incredibly needed. So profoundly needed.
Which is why we need to do the soulful work of keeping our hearts open. And to do this deep work, we need to experience the antidote to the rugged individualism that splits us off from ourselves and each other. We need the caring embrace of community.
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| If you're living grief, you are a brave warrior of love. I bow to your broken heart. |
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| "The work of the mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two things." ― Francis Weller |
I am moved to end with these excerpts from the Preface by Francis Weller to Duane Elgin's brilliant and exceptional new book, Choosing Earth ― https://choosingearth.org/. Hopefully you will find something here that speaks to you, that nourishes your heart and soul, that inspires you to hold both grief and gratitude and to live with greater open-heartedness, and to act together out of fierce love for our beautiful, hurting world. We are all needed.
An Apprenticeship With Sorrow
Grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. Our ability to stay present to this tidal wave of loss depends on our capacity to cultivate this essential skill. We must take up an apprenticeship with sorrow.
Our apprenticeship begins when we come to understand that grief is ever-present in our lives. This is a difficult realization, but one which has the opportunity of opening our heart to a deeper love for our singular life and for the wind-swept world of which we are a part. We begin with the simple gesture of picking up the shards of grief that lie littered on the floor of our house. We begin by building our capacity to hold sorrow in the tender hut of the heart... And then we invite one, two... a few trusted others, to gather and share the ongoing waves of sorrow as they come ashore. "Our ability to love and comfort is expanded by others' grief, our own too-big-to-be-contained pain finds its freedom in others' witnessing of it."
Grief is more than an emotion; it is also a core faculty of being human. It is a skill that must be developed, or we will find ourselves migrating to the margins of our lives in hopes of avoiding inevitable entanglements with loss. Grief invites gravity and depth into the psyche. Fortunately, we possess the capacity to metabolize sorrow into something medicinal for our soul and the soul of the world.
One of the essential practices in our apprenticeship is our ability to hold one another in times of grief and trauma. This skill has, for the most part, been lost under the extreme weight of individualism, especially in Western, industrial cultures....
But what of traumas impinging on us from the wider world? Here, [Duane] Elgin proposes a new way of framing the global field. He introduces Chronic Planetary Traumatic Stress, and writes: "The difference between PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and CPTS is that, instead of a relatively brief and confined episode, the trauma is life-long and planetary in scope. There is no escape ― the burden of collective trauma permeates the psyche and soul of humanity." There is no escape! Whether we acknowledge the wider traumas or not, our psyches register the disruption. How could we not? Our lives, our bodies, our souls, are entirely entwined with the beauty and sorrows of the world. As Elgin points out, without containment, the chronic traumas of the planet will leave many of us "deeply wounded, both psychologically and socially." The capacity to create spaces potent enough to hold the intense energies of our raw grief is a key element in our apprenticeship with sorrow....
How are we to respond when life confronts us with overwhelming circumstances? How can we hold all that we feel when the source is far beyond our ability to control? How do we recalibrate our inner lives to heal our psyches in times of trauma? Here are a few offerings for tending our souls during traumatic times ― and who isn't living in traumatic times?
1. Practice self-compassion. Self-compassion helps us hold our vulnerability with kindness and tenderness, allowing us to remain soft and open. Times of great uncertainty call for a level of generosity to ourselves that helps offset the effects of trauma that can often envelop our emotional body. This must be our first and primary intention: to hold all that we experience with compassion ― to offer a safe place for our fear and grief to land.
2. Turn toward the feelings. No bypass or strategy of avoidance can help resolve the difficult emotions we will encounter. Turning toward our suffering is essential. Not only must we endure times of pain and sorrow, hoping to get beyond them, we must also actively engage them and feel them fully. This move takes great courage. However, without adequate compassion and support, it is hard to open ourselves up to the painful emotions that await us.
3. Be Astonished by Beauty. Trauma has a profound impact on our feelings of aliveness, often generating a state of numbness or anesthesia. This anesthetized state protects us for a time from having to encounter the raw, searing emotions that often accompany trauma, but is also dulls our sensual engagement with all that surrounds us. Beauty's allure helps to fully open the aperture of the heart. Sorrow and beauty side-by-side. The soul has a fundamental need for encounters with beauty ― a central source of nourishment that continually renews our sense of vitality and awe.
4. Patience. Healing from trauma takes times. Patience helps heal vulnerable pieces of soul splintered by trauma. Knitting a bone takes time. Mending the soul takes even longer. The soul's deep wisdom knows the value of going slowly. Stepping out of the manic pace of modern culture is essential for regaining our footing in the world of soul. Patience is a discipline, a practice that reassures wounded, vulenrable souls, and helps us reap the benefits of our efforts.
A Gradual Awakening, An Emerging World
Our long apprenticeship with sorrow results in a spaciousness capable of holding it all ― the loss and the beauty, the despair and the longing, the fear and the love. We become immense. Our steady devotion to working with the heavy cargo of grief, slowly softens the heart and we feel our connection with the wider, sentient world expanding. Our time in the depths helps us to develop a felt intimacy with the Earth and the cosmos. We come home. We sense a diminishing distance between us and others. Our identities become permeable, and we feel a growing kinship with the human and more-than-human community. A new reverence for life emerges as we sense the living presence of the Earth as an organism embedded in a living cosmos.
This is our dawning experience of a possible future for the Earth.....
― Francis Weller
For Francis Weller's book The Wild Edge of Sorrow,
please go here:
💗
Bless us all,
Molly
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