Good morning, friends. Today I feel moved to greet you with a poem about love and belonging and grandmothers that know there are brighter days waiting for us, inspired by my (chosen) abuela (grandmother) Anita, a woman I look forward to telling you more about one day.
A fresh day cracks open and I pour it into a pan already hot with butter. The yellow sizzles all sun soaked, all drenched in crackling gold. Light pours in and I daydream drift to the yellow of my youth. It's Sunday and she says "ándale! Se van a enfriar!" The eggs are getting cold and I am a child, and it's only morning but I am already weary in my bones. She's not, she's as timeless as the yellow pouring in through the crack at the bottom of the door. "Richo, ya! Levántese!" Richo is "Rachel" when it slips through cracks and treks across borders and comes back and feels like home. She also calls strawberries "sisterberries" which ripened in our secret place and I still have never tasted better. And if I listen close I swear I hear her laughter and I miss her. All sun warmed. All bathed in gold. She calls me into the light with her. The fresh day is here. "Ándale! Come eat the sunshine!" Cracked open, yellow, just for you.
Gentle rhythms
These days I wake up with a smile. This is new for me. If I'm honest, many, many mornings have met me with dread and unshakeable fatigue. I'm learning what it means for me to wake up truly happy, which means learning what kind of life my spirit needs for the day to unfold its promises and what it takes for me to soften into those possibilities with my heart open. It's not about striving or straining, it's about safety and surrendering. I'm finding a new pace. And by new I mean ancient, and by ancient I mean this pace feels like home, like a rhythm my body already knows. I say I'm learning, but the sharper truth is I'm unlearning, unraveling, undoing everything my truth was buried under to return to myself.
The body loves to feel safe. Safe is slow, safe is still, safe is soft. This is why it matters that our bodies and Earth’s bodies become and remain safe enough to remember slowness as an inevitable part of life. To open gently, like the buds of spring just barely emerging, millimeter by millimeter, from the tips of spindly, sprawling, winter branches. To take our time. To move slow enough to see miracles made manifest. Receptivity to and presence with the more-than-human world is what changes our cells, and our cells are what change the world around us. Our settled, healed, soothed nervous system cells, vibrating low and slow, co-regulating with the grounded, tender, consistent humming of Earth's nervous system.
Hush the rush
Healing my pace also shows me that in a thousand subtle ways I'm still in a rush. There is no real reason. I made the essential decision to leave my job in late December, and my days are spaciously self-determined now. Yet I carry the legacy of a life long-lived where every minute mattered to make it all somehow work out. I carry the legacy of dragging along the day’s unfinished, burdensome baggage into the next and the next, burying myself under the weight of all the undone’s. My kitchen laughs at me for this, through spills and bangs and burns. I'm not clumsy, I'm just moving too fast. I sip coffee from a scorching mug I know is too hot, but how could I wait? I'm already behind. I woke up too late. My mouth will carry the imprint of this urgency for the rest of the day, gnawing and nagging at me. A burnt tongue is the smallest of injuries, but it's the signal that survival mode still lingers in me, shows me there is still more to let go. The more I slow down, the more I see the places where the patterns are still present, even and especially in their mundanity. This work is not always glamorous, not always remarkable or profound. This is the long and holy road of dismantling and deprogramming, and on any long stretch of road the shifts in landscape can barely be traceable (I mean... Nebraska...never again, I promise myself!).
Some of us are living life in perpetual survival mode. Some of us are running from accumulated pain with no outlet. Some of us are running to stay acclimated to a socially-approved threshold-speed set too high by permanent stress activation. Overwork is a form of running. Constantly traveling is a form of running. Constantly moving (from job to job, apartment to apartment, city to city, partner to partner) can be a form of running. And running is sometimes necessary, but it's not sustainable. If we think of humanity as a frequency, our species is buzzing, always "on". So to try to cohere to that frequency as one of many efforts to belong, means to run, constantly run. Until we crash.
But bees buzz too. Bees are the antithesis of stillness. Even in their hives, there is always a vibration. Though, this buzz is a dedication of purpose, a contribution to the community altar. Their buzz is an animated communal chorus. Their buzz sings of love. Their buzz hums of life. I don't want to anthropomorphize bees to try to commune with their sacred through a humanistic lens, no, their sacred speaks for itself and no, we are not bees, but the bees have medicine to share with us through their ways of buzzing beautifully, seamlessly, gracefully. The bees have taught me a million lessons over the last year of sharing residence – me in the wood-shingled rancher's cottage built in 1902, them in the wooden stacked boxes built probably in 2019. If 2021 had a soundtrack, mine was 85% bee buzz, 15% Arooj Aftab. And that bee buzz became the sweet, gentle hum of my life, like the sound of my own heartbeat, meditative, constant. Buzzing me into belonging with the bees.
I hear a lot of us are exhausted and a lot of us feel lost. How can I really, deeply get the rest I need? Where do I truly, completely belong in the way I deserve? Will I finally find what I seek (the where, the who....)? These are the questions I hear in the hearts I have the honor of tuning into around the world. I guess what I want to say is: if you feel like you don't fit in, like you can't keep up, like you can't push or chase your way through one more day of your life... well, me neither. The truth is, the dominant reality we exist in right now, the man-made one, isn't designed to serve our divinity, to ground us, to settle us, to connect us. We don't actually belong, we don't fit in, not to a modernity-obsessed, scarcity-strained, technologically-addicted culture. That isn't who we are.
Belonging is co-created
I have gradually stopped trying to belong to that, but I needed alternatives to turn to as healthy "replacements." I needed something that felt like me, deep and true me. I followed the honey-dripped devotional path of my bee kin to find my place back in the fold of a much vaster family, as tiny as a mushroom the size of my fingernail, and as massive as the cosmos. I am continuously learning to not simply be in nature, but to be with nature, to be nature. This world we live with, this world we are, is one of soft power, sensual spirit, and sublime sensitivity. And we fit right in to this world.
I started this piece talking about a simple burnt tongue instead of gaping trauma wounds because I think it's important to remember that our patterns are reinforced by small gestures, too, and our healing is enabled by micro-movements in the direction of our ease, of our safety.
This society is designed to fuel addictions, not self-trust nor community support, so what a radical act of resistance is it to not mediate every aspect of our lives through our phones, but to reclaim our agency and reconnect with the magic of the universe? We can also remember that this society is designed to fuel empires, not naps, so what a radical act of resistance is it to lay supine, get your belly up aiming skyward, maybe in the sun somewhere with clouds or birds or other companions to remind you that you're exactly where you need to be? (And of course, we can't talk about naps without nodding to the inimitable Bishop of Naps aka The Nap Ministry).
Melt into coherence
Sometimes I yearn to melt the hearts of those so insistent on destruction… but then I see I still have more melting to do right here. I wonder if all of us really committed to our own melting. Would that tidal wave of fluidly, fully feeling create a flood that could lovingly force those who rigidly cling to sucking up more oil, to building more bombers, to denying more rights, to instead bend and release and flow into surrender, back into a deeper belonging? I wonder if we stayed right here and stopped running for a while, if we tended to ourselves and healed the wounds that make us rush. Could we be Earth's allies, bringing our healed nervous systems into our relationships and offering ourselves up for co-regulation? Could we be the healthy alternative that says, "hey, you could turn to your phone or your beer or your news channel... but you could also turn to me. I'm right here. And you belong with me, and the moon, and the hawk. We belong." It could be beautiful, right? Luckily, it's all right here for us, waiting to cohere.
As my mentor john a. powell says, "belonging isn't an invitation to someone else's party. Belonging is everybody's party." Could this collective liberation be pleasurable? Could it be everybody’s party in honor of our equal and eternal divinity? May it be so.
With the yellow sunshine of belonging beaming your way,
Rach
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A Beautiful and Rich post... Unlearning is what we need to go through in the 2nd part of our life. Reminds me of Robert Bly's writing on the shadow:"He describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our backs. As we're growing up we put in the bag every aspect of ourselves that is not acceptable to our families and friends. Bly believes we spend the first few decades of our lives filling up our bags, and spend the rest of our lives trying to retrieve everything we put in our bag in an effort to lighten our burdens."
This piece jolted me a bit - I saw myself so deeply reflected in your description of feelings of survival and scarcity but I appreciated the re-frame that these feelings aren’t necessarily self-inflicted, they are resulting from the dominant reality you describe. I want to unlearn too. The notion of micro-movements toward ease will stick with me. Thank you for this!!