So many children gone, lost in our joint madness. Broken hearts cry out. -Saoirse Charis-Graves
In times when I have no words
I move slow and
I listen to the birds.
Singing, singing, singing.
All day.
I listen.
“Imagine if we sang like that from morning to night,” I asked Ava this afternoon.
“We’d sure have sore throats,” she quipped back.
On days like today, when I have no words,
I think we need to risk sore throats …
And sing.
When a crisis, of the kinds that we're experiencing contemporarily, happens, there are, at least for the purpose of our conversation, two basic kinds of moves. One move is to converge, based on memory, the image that we've received ... we're trying to repackage ourselves, trying to defeat ... get back to what we knew before, into our consumerist, capitalist perpetuity. Or we can decide to do something with our wounds ... that wounds are sometimes not to be cured—that some wounds are portals, access points in a rhizomatic universe to other ways of being and becoming. - Bayo Akomolafe
My Mom cries every time there’s a goodbye. Even just a see you tomorrow kind of, see ya later sort of goodbye. For so long I felt burdened by her tears, as if they were mine to take care of, as if they were some sort of rope holding me down from life. Today, as I said goodbye to the girls, an average, every-day kind of goodbye, closing the door behind me, tears streaming down my face, standing at the window waving until the last moment, just as my Grandma used to do … it hit me just how sacred, how uncertain, how fragile and precious each goodbye is … without any certainty of another hello. The deep honouring of life and death … love found in each one of those tears.
"The glorification of busy will destroy us. Without space for healing, without time for reflection, without an opportunity to surrender, we risk a complete disconnect from the authentic self. We burn out on the fuels of willfulness, and eventually cannot find our way back to center. And when we lose contact with our core, we are ripe for the picking by the unconscious media and other market forces. After all, consumerism preys on the uncentered. The farther we are from our intuitive knowing, the more easily manipulated we are. The more likely we are to make decisions and affix to goals that don’t serve our healing and transformation. To combat this, we have to form the conscious intention to prioritize our inner life. To notice our breath, our bodies, our feelings. To step back from the fires of overwhelm and remember ourselves. It may feel counter-intuitive in a culture that is speed-addicted, but the slower we move, the faster our return home."—Jeff Brown
“The times are urgent. We must slow down. The times are urgent! We must slow down. The times are urgent. We must slow down.” – Bayo Akomolafe
We must slow down…
To go in.
To feel.
To grieve.
To cry.
To breathe.
To tend our wounds.
To witness and to “with-ness”.
To listen.
To fall into new portals.
To imagine.
To become.
To wonder.
To create.
To fail.
To sing.
To let go.
To connect.
To heal.
To love.
Until Tomorrow …
N
(un)becoming ... with wonder & possibility 