entering the clearing

A friend asked me today how I was figuring out the current crisis, and we had a lovely clarifying conversation about our respective struggles and journeys. A few ideas surfaced for me that I want to preserve and share.

One is that I’m looking to the desired present instead of a desired future. Not because I have no hopes or aspirations for the future, but because I don’t find it helpful right now to aim for something I can’t see. I don’t know what the future will hold. I don’t know where this moment goes. I’m hoping there’s a future out there so different from this one that I can’t even imagine it fully much less trace a path to it by design. All I want to do is find the best part of whatever moment I am in, and work with that.

My friend asked if I thought humanity would better or worse after this moment and I realized don’t think there is an “after” in the sense of a threshold, a “before and after”. I think the change is already here, I think “better” or “worse” will be a mix, and what happens next will play out on vastly different timescales. Some of the realities of today will be a memory a year from now. Some of the implications won’t be apparent for generations. My grandmother was shaped by the Depression, and through her it shaped her children, and through them her grandchildren. So I’m not navigating by a future vision, I’m looking to the immediate moment and trying to find the need in it and serve that need with whatever I have to give. As my friend put it, thinking of her one-year-old, this moment is requiring us to model the kind of people we need to be right now in order to get through this, and that’s what the future really needs from us.

I’m also trying to pace myself. In all ways I’m trying to find the rhythm I can live by, to pace my sorrows and my joys, to let there be swells of activity and ebbs of rest. I’m thinking about the last time I sang in a crowd, one of the evenings of song and harmonizing led by Vanessa Richards at her Van Van Song Society weekly drop-in choir (now moved online where she’s exploring new ways to keep community connected in song), and what it feels like to be part of a throng of people feeling each other out by voice. One of the things I love about Vanessa’s choir is the freedom to simply to sing together, without any particular aspiration beyond joy, community, and finding what sounds good to our ears and our bodies. We vocalize and play and find harmonies and fit in where we feel comfortable. That’s the kind of pacing I’m seeking, feeling out where I fit amidst all the other voices and bodies, in a way that’s comfortable to me while lending myself to the song. This is a long road, but we’re walking it together.

And that’s the other thing I’m working on. To learn to see myself always as connected. To see my work not as amplifying and serving individuals or organizations (though I may be working with individuals and organizations), but as amplifying and serving connections, communities, wholes. That what I do (or don’t do) ripples outward, and to feel a sense of responsibility to that, but not as an individual burden, because I am connected. That’s terrifying to me because I don’t know if I’m up for it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be as self-sufficient as possible, to feel as safe as possible that I won’t inconveniently need something I can’t provide or acquire for myself, to avoid the terror and (and sometimes literal danger) of vulnerability. But I’ve only been able to do that by leaning into capitalism, ableism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy culture (and everything else inextricably tied up in all of that), which means lessening the terror and danger for myself, at least temporarily, but only by pushing it off onto others. There’s a curve of inequality that desperately needs to be flattened.

So the seeds I am planting now, in the upturned, upheaved soil of my life, are ones of kindness, connection, and trust. I can’t engineer the future, but I can fill the present moment with what matters most to me and know that it will ripple outward from there.

One way to keep things rippling out is to support fundraising and mutual aid efforts in your area if you are in a position to do so. Here are some of the ones I’ve been supporting. We are connected and we need each other.

Here’s the poem that Vanessa closed out our most recent evening of choir with, which spoke to my heart in perfect, bell-like tones:

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

Martha Postlewaite