Edgewalking in the apocalypse

Could it be less lonely?

May 15, 2022

Hello hello.

Wow. It’s a lot out there, isn’t it? Too much. I do hope this place feels like a watering hole for weary spirits. I care about y’all very much. Most of you show up here every week. I don’t take that for granted.

Hey, before you get into reading this, is there something nice you might do for a second? Grab a cold drink if it’s hot where you are, or a blanket if it’s cold? Stretch or shake your body? Take a deep breath?

Thank you for your presence here. Thank you for sharing this little digital refuge with others when you feel inspired.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
David Foster Wallace

Last Saturday a tornado ripped through me and left me gasping for breath between guttural sobs. Just moments before, I followed the familiar flow of what has become a treasured ritual of final revision on my weekly post, before that climactic click of the "publish" button. I sighed with relief – another transmission to you, beloved community – and I expected the tender belly-flutters of anticipation to buzz for a bit and then dissipate. But then I was crumpled on the floor.

I felt wrecked, crushed, drained. I scanned my psyche for an explanation. Did it have anything to do with what I published, or was it some latent release of rage regarding Roe v Wade amidst relentless onslaughts of governmental neglect and betrayal on all scales? Or was it unprocessed worry for friends and family persevering through numerous heartaches and tragedies? Or heightened sensitivity to this astrological compression between two tempestuous eclipses within which we’re constellated? (Scorpio South Node?!!)

I checked "yes" on all of the above, but then a messy, mangled truth surfaced: I'm scared and I'm lost and I'm lonely. And the texture of these feelings was unusual. This was not my typical confrontation with my frequent guests like insecurity and avoidance. It was a trembling terror of something far more harrowing. I was deeply shaken. I cried on and off for four days.

By Thursday, storm-cleansed clarity arrived and luminosity returned to my landscape. What happened settled into focus. In a uniquely embodied way, I felt my conviction and my integrity forged anew. This reckoning and revelation was the sacred, bellowing grief-cry of needing to be held in community beyond capitalistic, consumptive, commodity culture, to be authentically cared with and for, to live in a world that doesn't yet exist.

The truth is, I have always felt this way. But instead of sitting in that mildly uncomfortable longing that has lingered with me throughout my life, I was slammed with a psychospiritual, existential crisis. I felt huge forces churn through me. Abandonment. Terror. Isolation. I felt the tangible ways this manifested in personal relationships, but I also felt as though I tapped into the immense, ancient, universal experience of suffering that is surviving within the limitations of oppression that keep us from loving each other well. The ways in which embittered hearts, drained reservoirs, and weary spirits struggle to show up for the service of love.

I know I'm not alone in this. This zoom chat message has reverberated through me for weeks. I bow deeply to Kay for this, and I share it as both witnessing and offering.

We are not alone in this explosive, planetary experience of feeling under-loved. And Kay gives us questions as lifelines to lift ourselves out of despair and remember that we can choose to proactively love one another even and especially when we're emptied out, because the only way out of these cycles of violence is going through the pain and the exhaustion and the isolation and the struggle with our hearts intact and our selves integrated. Kay reminds us that the path to care culture is simple (even if it's not easy): "how are you being loved and how are you loving?"

Something is happening right now. Something for which there are few tools, few texts. Something that cannot be mapped nor measured. We're running out of words for it. Our lives are transforming beyond recognition. I understand this moment as not simply unprecedented (though that would be enough), not simply apocalyptic (though that would be enough), but as initiatory (still too small a word, but in my mind it gets closer). What I mean is, we are moving through something. There is another side. These are not end times, but bridge times, that can lead to radical transformation, but by its nature cannot and will not be convenient nor comfortable. And we are all here on the threshold of change with choices to be made about what we are initiating into.

In that regard, I know that in some ways this acute and immense experience arrived on my psychic doorstep not only because of a collective upsurge in awareness of lovelessness in our world, but because I am in the midst of soul-defining initiation: making the empowered choice to follow my Dharmic path and embrace myself as an artist, specifically a writer.

To be an artist means to be a peripatetic scholar of the collective unconscious, to walk the "knife-edge between abysses"1, to trek across the wilderness of nonlinear spacetime greeting ancestors, guides, spirits, and other invisible beings who've conjured medicine and mystery and magic in these fertile territories for millennia, to be the vessel that carries it back to the village so that it may serve.

To walk this path with awareness means to confront soul-piercing questions: what am I doing? Does any of this matter? Does anyone care? Am I shouting into a void? Was it a grave mistake to plunge myself into the cauldron of creation? And then, once those questions have rattled your bones enough times to test your fortitude, it means making yourself exceedingly inhospitable to those exact questions. These are the invisible battles of a spiritual warrior, continuously melting the ego to serve with sharpened integrity.

In "The Artist's Way" Julia Cameron grabs each of us by the shoulders and gives us a firm shake to dislodge the dust off our calcified creative spirits. YOU ARE AN ARTIST!!! (Yes, YOU!) She admonishes, she reminds, she demands, she instills the fear of god in us, and, ever-so-gently, she guides us back into that truth.

I believe this initiatory moment is reinforcing Cameron’s idea. We are artists bringing into being a liberated paradigm. We are builders, we are makers, we are architects, we are engineers, we are doulas, we are dreamers. The necessary step is to embrace this opportunity to actively participate. This is supreme responsibility.

To live life as an artist is to surrender yourself entirely to the uncontainable, unpredictable process of alchemizing spirit into form to bring sustenance through new life to the collective. To be an artist is to be a mother, regardless of gender.

Mothering is creation. We are all creators, whether that’s of children or otherwise.

We are mothers. We are artists. (Yes, YOU! *Julia and I lovingly shake the dust off you.*) No matter how fast we might want to run in the opposite direction, this is the mighty mandate of our time.

And mothers and artists are two of the most unsupported roles in our world. It is physically and spiritually unsafe for the vast majority of us to be an artist and to be a mother in the existing paradigm. We have seen these holy roles drained of their dignity for generations as the pressures of toxic forces undermine, invalidate, dehumanize, and exploit what mothers and artists are here to do: to channel and nourish life through love.

So what would it mean to recognize ourselves, all of us, as artists and mothers? It would mean to treasure the act of creation as primary, to see each of us as responsible to work toward the welfare of the world, and to be emphatically supported for contributing our gifts to one another, affirmed with the abundance that is here for us equally and generously.

It would mean to align ourselves with the Great Mother who shows us the way.

It would mean funneling countless hours to laboring, tending, caring, nurturing, nourishing, stewarding – a revolution unto itself, transforming a culture that demands measurability, urgency and profitability into one that relies on mystery, patience, and sacrifice.

It would mean making artistry and mothering safe.

It would mean freedom, yours and mind. It would mean a world built on love.

How would it feel to embody your inner artist and mother, in your own ways?

I return to David Foster Wallace's quote:

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

If we understood ourselves as artists and mothers, this is the world we would live into. There are three offerings on my heart to channel his wisdom into action that I think are pretty sexy:

Redistribute/circulate affirmation:

In the attention economy, affirmation, support, and acknowledgment are concentrated amongst those who already have it. The crude tools of engagement we have available are likes, hearts, follows, shares, comments, which flow toward the "top" instead of circulating equitably. This is a microcosm of capitalism's larger trends. This also reinforces celebrity/influencer culture: perpetuating pedestals, promoting people who already have power, and suggesting only certain people deserve to be seen/heard. Those who receive disproportionate attention from the collective also grow accustomed to this, which breeds narcissism. This co-dependency sustains hierarchy instead of honoring everyone's potency, everyone's potential, everyone's presence as its own precious offering.

As an antidote, I'm wondering how we can claim responsibility for redistributing and circulating our attention and awareness currencies, particularly to those who are contributing in the public domain in ways that make a positive impact? How we can practice attentional equity, and offer abundant expression of appreciation to one another?
As a prompt, I’m wondering who is someone in your life right now who is inspiring possibility and potential in your world? Who is showing up in service to the collective, especially if they're often under-appreciated? Maybe this is several people, and maybe it’s you! Could you take a few minutes to send a little digital note of witnessing/recognition for their commitments - whether that’s a a text, a voice note, an email - even to yourself?

Remember self+other as mutually reliant:

Both real and internalized scarcity creates self-consumption. Capitalism has distorted our reality to live in a world where resources are hoarded or deprived based on arbitrary yet consequential constructs of racism, patriarchy, etc. Participating in work that cares for the collective is delegitimized and de-valued on every level. That means many of us are feeling undermined, deprived, and unsupported within these cruel demands. Survival sometimes requires total self-focus. Yet, self-absorption can be an unintentional way of staying stuck and making a harsh tradeoff: self at the expense of others, instead of remembering solidarity with others sustains everyone. Most situations in life ask us to consider more than just ourselves, but we can always tend to ourselves in any process. I truly believe that society will shift when we practice the potent combination of simultaneous self-and-other responsibility, self-and-other remembrance. I truly believe we will have enough when we have each other.

As a prompt, I’m wondering who is someone in your life right now who reinforces your sense of self by being themselves? Who gives you permission to be more you? Who is radically and authentically expressing themselves with love and making it easier to be human? Who is representing the sacred principle of Ubuntu (I am because you are)? Maybe these are different people, or one. Could you take a few minutes to send a little love their way - a “like”, a comment, a phone call - of witnessing/recognition for their courage? Maybe you don’t have anyone in your world that feels this way, and that’s ok too. Maybe you’re about to call someone like this in.

Meet anew:

I resurface Kay’s breathtaking prompt: can we re-introduce ourselves to each other by who/what we are feeling loved by? I think of Omid Safi's teaching on the Muslim cultural practice of asking “Kayf haal-ik?” which translates from Arabic to English as: "How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?" Can we really check in with each other, can we meet each other anew, can we pause to hear the answer?

May we be held, may we be cared for, may we walk the thin, trembling edges knowing we are less lonely and more companioned in Creating the new paradigm. May we understand at a deep level that it is love that will see us through.

May we affirm the shit out of each other and make it a little less lonely in these initiatory times.

With deep love,

Rachel

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