Shifting Sands
I’ve worked on this piece for quite a while without having any luck in finishing. The problem is that my daily experience shifts so drastically from one day to the next that what seems true to say changes. I’d like to contain here some of what is happening while acknowledging the crazy roller coaster aspect and the shifting sands of the playing field we are all on right now. The need to “roll with the punches” and accept change as an inevitable part of life, I think, is central now to nearly everyone’s experience.
Belly of the Beast
How much of your ugly pain can you accept? The pain that seems petty, jealous, inept, immature. All of it? The pain that is so many pains tied together in a sticky seemingly unresolvable knot. How much of your feeling of lack can you accept when you know you “should” feel, “should” be, grateful for the abundance of your life though it seems out-of-reach? How much disconnection from this gratitude? How much slithering want, desire, neediness, hurt, grief? All of it? How is it possible to accept the huge or the unaccountably heavy and seemingly small but insidious suffering? How to love yourself in the face of your inability to change, shift, release in this moment?
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!
Ok, that is not exactly accurate. Yes, it is the end of the world as we know it (thank God!) but I don’t exactly feel fine right now. Last week I was flying, this week not so much, but I still feel hopeful about the real changes that are going down on a world scale. For the first time ever, I would say literally for the first time in human history, real total change is happening. Real evil, real darkness, really sick structures are being dismantled. Are there people suffering with these changes? Yes. Were masses of people, the most dispossessed, suffering extraordinarily before this? Yes! Will it be better when the worst of it wanes? No question in my mind.