This year I've thought a lot about stories, the stories I tell myself about my own life and the larger world I witness around me. And I know more than ever that the extent to which I am exposed to the horrors of the world is the extent to which I need to seek out its beauty.
I'm wary of blotting out 2017 completely, with all of its loss and explicit displays of hate. For when I zoom into my - to our - grief and anger, it always quietly reveals a central pearl of love, the pearl of giving a damn. For so many years I didn't know how to slow down enough to respect that pearl, care for it, instead of whack-a-moling my emotions away. But when I do, there's space. Alot of it.
So, at the very beginning of this year, I'm thinking a lot about the profound practice of zooming in and out, both into the dignity of our experience, and out to the wholeness of it. I recently was so moved by Carl Sagan's reflections on a photograph of Earth, "The Pale Blue Dot" monologue from Cosmos.
That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines...every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child...
Every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Somehow acknowledging all of it, respecting the wholeness of all its brokenness and beauty, I'm less drowned by it. Somehow there is the new spaciousness to do the work I need to do in this time.
I don't any better way to hold vast, varied truth than through honoring the basics - sleep, meditation, real food, connection & empty-space-outbreath/play. May our New Year's intentions hold these as well.
Also, news to me - some most stunning contributions of humanity yet happened this year - read about 99 of them!
Love,
Melanie
PS. In the Dark was fantastic, and I'll get some video to you soon. And, what a year to celebrate in my music-as-a-force-for-good department, below! You can read more about all of these and the goofs/splats/dreams behind the scenes, here.
UPCOMING IN THE REAL WORLD
Thursday, January 25th - House Concert (stand by just a liiittle bit longer for deets!)
Friday, January 26th - Private Show
Singing Outside the Shower: 21st Century Folk Repertoire
January 10th - February 14th @ The Freight