Uncovering Core Issues

Parts of grief that one avoids

It’s been a month. It’s been almost a half year. It’s over 500 days. It’s been many decades (since the Reagan administration really) and since the Nakhba (1948) It’s been since the Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment, and why don’t we just say, since European settlers arrived and whiteness was defined by the colonial legal system in the 1600s. The core issues that are motivating the current authoritarian backlash have been there a long time: “power over” rather than “with,” extraction and exploitation of the earth and its peoples, removal of any sort of safety net, daily terror for marginalized folks, poisoned air, water, food, corruption played out and exposed on the grandest scale we can imagine with no repercussions. For some, this is a time of emotional and nervous system shut down, and I recognized that I am riding the edge of it daily.

My undiagnosed attention-deficit NON-disorder which has always served my muses and my ability to glide through many challenges using intuition and imagination, has brought its own backlash in this time, making it hard for me to complete things, making me reach for more than I can take in, and making it hard for me to slow down and use my daily practices. I am sitting with those deficits this morning with compassion. It’s a lot that we carry now. More than the human nervous system is supposed to hold. Thomas Hübl speaks of this situation of overwhelm and overload, as have many others. To understand intellectually is not enough. We need to ground with practices, and that’s something that my inner teenager is rebelling against lately. Today, I’m sitting with her and asking, “what’s up?”

They say that the Scorpio Full Moon reveals all sorts of shit hidden under the psyche’s rug (its resonance lasting for days) and I would say that’s been happening on steroids this week. It’s not a bad thing; it’s helped me to throw some delusions into the compost heap. I’ve been questioning everything that I’ve taken for granted, things I held as my truth, and wondering whether I will be able to stand strong once I’ve peeled off all the layers of false reasoning. It’s not easy work. It triggers every story that we’ve told ourself about ourself.

I try and fill my head with as many uplifting stories as I can find about folks organizing, doing direct actions, offering mutual aid, responding to the collective trauma in positive ways (here’s one), but the actual bull shit that is going on is so vile, inhuman, corrupt, immoral, and sadistic that it is hard to keep my nervous system free from the its tentacles.

Today, on the anniversary of the Nakba, I decided to go to the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Power half-hour on Zoom where participants can “channel grief & outrage into action to stop a genocide.” It was good to be with hundreds of participants who gather there four days a week to learn what actions they can participate in and to sign petitions on behalf of a ceasefire, to demand the release of students who’ve been detained (kidnapped, really) by ICE (thugs), and to feel a modicum of collective strength. This group has been meeting online since the early days of the genocide and I am truly bowled over by their commitment to this form of activism. I signed a few petitions, and reflected on the two trips that I took as a teenager (funded by well meaning, but uninformed, Zionist grandparents) and how the evidence of apartheid, racism, and the impossible and cruel situation of occupation was already evident in 1969 and 1972. I became firmly pro-Palestinian from those experiences to the horror of that side of the family. Thankfully my father was always anti-Zionist, and I looked for solidarity in that ilk all through my adulthood. Here’s what is going on in that region today:

It’s important to remember that on-the-ground Israelis are typically not raving Zionists and violent racists; there’s been evidence of this for a long time, but it doesn’t enter the mainstream media. Here’s a discussion between an Israeli-born Palestinian scholar and an Israeli daughter of Holocaust survivors that might give you all more to chew on. Krista Tippett, the podcast host, reminds us that powers are not symmetrical and it should not be a competition to see who is more traumatized by the situation. All of us who feel deeply are traumatized, but not everyone is dealing with everyday threats to our lives with a soundtrack of drones, explosions, and screaming human beings and the horrific injustice of losing everyone and everything due to insane politics. It takes really good boundaries to compartmentalize the grief that everyone is taking in and go back to living an everyday life.

Perhaps it’s due to poor boundaries that I’ve not felt the call to go to my studio much since returning from Santa Fe. It’s like a drought. I don’t feel compelled to make more images or visual experiments. I have such a huge archive of work that includes laments, celebrations, questions, and self-reflections, and I don’t know what to do with them all. I haven’t been seeking exhibitions nor have there been many offers in the past year or two. I am not driven anymore to get that work out in the world. It doesn’t seem to be my calling. After several unsuccessful grant proposals, I’m in surrender mode, sitting and writing, reading, cooking, growing food (and sharing it when it’s ready), taking walks, sitting with community, and doing self-care. It feels like that “artist” part of me just wants to be quiet until the Muses tell me otherwise.

The facilitator/teacher part of me is also on hold. I’m also not feeling quite ready to offer workshops again, even though I know that there are people waiting for me to announce them so that they can sign up. I’ve been invited to lead workshops at the Seattle Public Library for the fall, and I’ve been asked to jury two different calls for work, so until those obligations are met, I don’t want to take on more. AND I have a book to finish. I’m writing query letters S-L-O-W-L-Y. I’m sure there’s some fear of rejection inside this slowness, and the book has an audience waiting. The latest draft is waiting for me to play with, and I just can’t seem to make the process move faster than it is.

When I returned from Santa Fe, I had set an intention to gather folks in my studio to generate activist art interventions in the community, but it feels like I had to AGAIN press the pause button to gather my energies for the task.

In my determination to not let the fascists to win by shutting down my spirit or the spirits of anyone I know, I defiantly drive to Olympia for my dance practice every Sunday with the 5Rhythms crowd and shake my outrage out of my body. Such good medicine! A comedy improv class offered by a friend grabbed me this spring, Go Before You’re Ready (GBYR). There, in a safe container, I can release some of the other stuck parts of myself. We practice: “Yes, and..” as the strategy that moves an improv scene. It disinhibits me to be in this group. I lose my other identities, arriving as an empty vessel (as best I can).

Last night our meditation group (a sangha) met in the backyard Zendo as we do most Thursday evenings. Since returning from my two-month residency, very few of the 15 or so people on my email list, have joined me, but whoever does come is just right. I was able to recalibrate a lot in the company of two elder women last night, our check-in’s, our silent breathing time, our self-massage/movement time (it was raining so no one ventured out for walking meditation in the garden), our reading of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on Happiness, and the discussion afterwards, and our final sit just filled my heart and I slept better than I have in weeks.

With these three forms, dance, improv performance, and mindfulness meditation, it seems that I am reconstructing a self that can adapt to this time in the world and be ready to take on more community-based collaborations that help us maneuver with love, kindness, connection, and under-the-radar actions that shift things.

To shake up or maybe solidify some of the shifts in perspective I’ve been experiencing, I have the privilege to go to a grief retreat this weekend with facilitators who are inspired by the work of Francis Weller (the gates of grief) and the rituals of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso that were brought to the world by Malidome & Sobonfu Some. I intend to process some of the collective grief I’ve been carrying with the community in this beautiful place. Even though it may seem impossible, I am carrying all of you with me.

Finally, I want to share some powerful medicine that arrived via adrienne maree brown on Instagram this morning. She interviewed the Olufemi O. Taiwo who is part of the editorial team for Hammer and Hope magazine. If you’re not on IG, just go to the website. Remember to look in the cracks and glitches - that’s where you’ll find some fertile soil.

Here’s some uplifting photos from my recent, brief trip to visit my brother’s family in San Francisco.

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This Field Station is a magical ecology installation with lovely rangers, specialists in trees, plant kin, and more, attending to the visitors.

I walked up and down these hills everyday so that I could take deep breaths of the eucalyptus trees in the Panhandle. Such a luscious smell that reminds me of the counterculture energy that still exists in San Francisco.

Thanks to Lynn and Kimo for taking my brother and me out in the Bay. We passed by Alcatraz Island in choppy waters, offering good energy to a space reclaimed by the Indigenous peoples and NO corrupt idiots are going to turn it back into carceral space - at least not while human beings with hearts are keeping watch.