Here is what I have been sitting with, gratefully at home for the last 53 days, as people die around me:
Can I make friends with my own sense of individual powerlessness in order to show up in my communities with more clarity and intention?
As I plead with my loved ones to stay home – confused and unduly assured by public officials’ laissez-faire attitudes towards human lives, as I pray for workers who have no choice but to go to work like lambs to slaughter, as I comfort grieving friends, there have been truly painful moments over the last 53 days when all I have felt is powerless.
Powerlessness is not easy. It is most certainly one of those uncomfortable feelings we have to sit with and tolerate if we are ever going to help usher in change. Accepting our individual powerlessness (née mortality) is also crucial to understanding what we must keep unlearning and relearning in the wake of COVID-19 on a deeply cellular and spiritual level, not just intellectual. With the injustices at the root of our global economy laid bare, now is the time to fundamentally dismantle and rebuild anything that separates us and causes harm.
I offer gratitude and love to Richael Faithful, Sayra Pinto, and Jen Lemen, whose witness and spaces have invited this poem to arrive, and countless others who have supported and transformed and guided me and many others in our ongoing remapping to the collective.
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