Inspired by my friend Kazu Haga, I've been sitting and listening alot in the past day to my heart, my mind and my body, and want to share from all those intelligences.
Part 1: I'm heartbroken. I'm staring into the face of the very real possibility that the most vulnerable people I love, the most vulnerable places I love, could now experience even more suffering and loss. That the path towards the restoration of a life sustaining, thriving and just world for all just got a whole lot steeper, a whole lot harder. My life my not change very much, considering what I look like, but many other people's will. I am afraid. I went to aikido, and let myself fall to the ground, over and over.
And, I read what is being written here on facebook and know my heart is broken alongside other incredible hearts. I'm bouyed by the writing here by people I know and respect - each speaking with an incredible wideness, a whole-hearted clarity, a commitment of fierce love, and kindness on how to be with each-other today, tomorrow, onward. We are calling each other. We are talking to strangers. We are listening. We are, as Rebecca Solnit says, falling together.
To me this is a huge clarification of something I remembered over dinner on election night. When the Dali Lama was asked by a reporter who his greatest spiritual teacher was, his response was Chairman Mao - "He shows me what I most love." When I fully accept the results of this election, it offers an incredible clarity, and incredible taking stock. These people and these places are what I love, and I will not, under any circumstances, cease to stand with them. I will put my body in the way.
Absolutely, I want to organize more efficiently, and get to work, but I don't want to too quickly pole-vault over the vast emotions of sadness, confusion and fear, because they are simply the other side of my love. I believe they hold the very compass that guide me as I take action, and sustain me. I want to follow the direction of nearly every great spiritual tradition and merge with that, get curious about it, listen to what is there. In my opinion, the activism of the last forty years has been deeply stunted from clipping civic action from grief, confusion, exhaustion and dark. If I clip this again, I'm likely to just create the same type of change that has been going for the last eight years. Which obviously hasn't been working well enough to prevent this.