To feel everything everywhere all at once, I only need to sit in circle, lean into the invisible and strong weaving of community at my back. Let go of the narrative of benefits and reasons. I feel then the illusion of sharp boundaries dissolving, as, one after another, people share their pain, their joy, their bewilderment, whatever they're bringing. And it is my pain, my joy, my bewilderment, too. But "mine" also dissolves...
Do we need to be done? Is there an unease when you feel you need to keep on practising? Does that unease dominate our lives? Is it ok to be always in the making?
I do wish us all a good 2024. I try to do it without a grimace, to fully touch that deep wish for a possibility I know is there. I wish us a year where more hearts open, where they open before taking decisions, before plowing the fields, before grabbing the land, before remotely striking a hospital, a school, a wasteland, a house sheltering others fighting for their and their land's freedom, before pulling the trigger. I wish us a year with more hugs, more singing, more loving, more laughing. I wish us a year with stronger backs so that we can soften our front and perceive the world.
What if... we remember how to welcome the Fruitful Darkness, how to sit with our fear, our pain, and also the challenge of possibility, of dream, of becoming? What if we allow ourselves to descend willingly and prepared to the Long Dark, where new life, new realities can be gestated and born?
How does one write a blog in the shadow of such an eruption of violence in the long, ongoing war between Israel and Gaza? Feeling for those in fear, in loss, those whose lives have been cut short. I notice that I had been distancing myself from the many other ongoing, lethal, violent, in my heart totally senseless and wasteful wars. A lovely woman brought the news to me a couple of days ago (I haven’t been much online), and the enormous sense of priviledge and resentment of that simply hit me…
I feel a paradox of emotions where I am... being safe and in relative coolness during this new heat wave, this Earth's fever; walking under such beautiful sunsets through scented forests and meeting the dying spruce, the drought preventing them to heal their wounds. From my window I see a new grey skeleton every day. And in the places where they have died and fallen, new growth welcomes all manner of critters. There's a certain ruthless hope in how life keeps on unfolding.
Howl's Moving Castle 