What I know.
I’ve been deeply joyful when I’ve been with people, in places, doing things, together. When I’m not, I can feel the inside story shift. I start to feel overwhelmed by the mess of it all, by the disempowering feeling that life isn’t being valued, all around. But then, I’m with people again, and that experience is almost the direct opposite. What a confusing place to toggle between. Which version is true, or less true?
I can’t know.
I feel at the mercy of the thrusts of movement towards and away from connection, from the drive to create and the need to consume, the terror and the bliss. With people and without.
Mercy, mercy.
I’m not interested in the theories and projections of what’s happening, the future-telling, the reduction-version answers to the biggest questions, the propagating of what being “good” looks like. I can’t figure out how to be with what’s happening now.
Do you?
Can we know that everyone wants safety? And isn’t. Everyone wants to be whole. But everyone is failing somewhere. Everyone has more capacity for freedom than they think they do and needs more limitation than they let on.
Grace.
In my self-soothing fantasy, the rebellion, the keepers of possibility and love, are underground. They are moving under our feet, they are walking next to us, they don’t post on IG, they are listening to the same words but when no one sees, they steal away, into their secret spaces, building and imagining and preparing to catch the fall. Let us be them, feed them and keep them safe.
There it is: my fantasy/prayer.
Some of these rebels were in Red Hook, Brooklyn this last weekend for the Liquid Cartographies festival put on by The Emergence Network and local artist, Krista Dragomer. They stealed away and with dance, art making, boat napping, river mapping, water rituals and backyard gathering, and they made known what was true about right now. They imagined, they prepared their bodies and hearts to catch a fall. I was honored to be a part of that fluid place. But what I am left with is the effect of being with people in the “water cooler” ways that happen in-between events. The conversations that spilled into the next thing, into connections, inspiration and delightful confusion that let me show up, as myself, so fully, to what I know- I know that I love the way we need each other.