There is the sky. Now, look down. There is the ground. Look around - At the trees, shedding leaves And the chipmunks, scurrying over the concrete step at the back door.
Look. At the birds, as they swoop, over and under the wires that connect your house to my house.
Notice. The sunlight. The air. Take a breath. Take it all in.
What is happening where you are? Make a list.
Here, the sun is setting. The soup is bubbling on the stove. My husband and I just relit the pilot light on the furnace. Yay us! Here, the phone is ringing. I hear the distant roar of an airplane, way overhead.
And you? What is happening where you are? There you are. Hello.
I have been writing this post for seven days. I put things in. I take things out. I will know when it’s ready. When it’s ready, you will have it, too.
Seven days after the eclipse, so this was Saturday, the 21st, I dreamed that I was able to inhale power. With each breath, a different part of my body filled - and lit up. My right shoulder glowed. My left hip. the right side of my forehead. It was so cool - a new kind of magic, so revolutionary that it woke me up.
Wow! I thought, as my eyes opened onto a new day. I wonder if I can do this with other things. Could I inhale color? Sunlight? Vitamins?
I am a slow writer. When overwhelming news stories start crashing against my shores, I can get a little panicky. I know I should watch. I know I should say something but I … can’t… not yet.
I need time to sit with myself - often for quite a while - and listen to the patterns of the world. I need to watch the shadows move across the face of the zeitgeist. I need signs and smoke signals to make the world into sense again.
This is not because I don’t care. This is not because I am ignoring my more extroverted friends who are asking EVERYONE to stand up and speak. This is me standing up. This is me speaking.
So, let me speak first to those who are grieving, and those who are terrified and those who feel shaken, even though they don’t understand the ancient and recent grievances which seem to have caused this attack.
Me too. And of course. Of course you are, we are, shaken. This is way too much. We aren’t made for a constant barrage of crisis. Our upset reminds us we are human. It reminds us that this is not normal.
This is not normal - and that’s good. We don’t want to be practiced in tragedy. We don’t want a habitual response. Thousands of people have died. Tens of thousands terrorized, relocated.
I want to feel this. It’s okay to not know, right away, what to say.
When I’m afraid, I don’t fight. I crouch. I listen, watch and wait. On the surface, I may seem calm. Inside, I’m moving toward the corners and closets where I hide. I like having a wall behind me. I like knowing that we have enough provisions.
I am noticing correspondences — signs and symbols, things that look like other things. I am watching for metaphors, the threads of poetry that are always floating through the zeitgeist.
Eventually a kind of meaning will weave itself together, and I will begin to locate myself in the chaos. I will find my feet. I will stand tall. I will know what to say and what to fight for.
Right now, I’m listening - and sharing what I hear and see with you.
Last week, before the Hamas attack, I saw this, from Judith Manriquez at You Are the Dream:
“During this eclipse we are invited to acknowledge where we are being given the gift of transformation. It feels like this eclipse is about upheaval. And to be clear, upheaval is not a negative thing. It is a state of being; a sudden change or disruption.
“Change and disruption break up our patterns and that’s often seen as negative. But in this case, I want to invite you to stretch so that you can see what’s opening up because disruption opens the way to see where we’ve gotten stiff, rigid, inflexible or in a rut.”
Which reminded me of the time when I was 28 and I lost - and kept losing my voice.
I’d been married for two years when I found myself dealing with a strange medical issue. Every month, when my period began, I lost my voice. Not when the blood started flowing. It happened when I saw it - on the toilet tissue, in my underpants. A strange and mystifying laryngitis - painless- it lasted about two days. I could barely make a sound - even a whisper.
Back then, I kind of understood it. We’d been trying to have a baby and, every month, my careful accounting of every sign and symptom had me convinced that this time I was really pregnant. But each month, in spite of the swollen breasts, heaviness in the pelvis, I walked into bathroom with a voice and walked out without one.
Maybe I’m remembering this story now because I cannot figure out what to say about Israel. The overwhelming grief of it - the blood, the lost children. The silent scream of the powerless. The senseless violence. I don’t know. I can’t find my words.
I have gotten stiff, rigid, inflexible or in a rut. Now, I am in upheaval, a state of being after a sudden change or disruption.
I tried to make a statement about what happened. Posted a few lines on Facebook. Took a stand. My sister-in-law liked it. A moment later, I deleted the post. I’m not afraid to speak out. It’s just that the way this conflict framed up - with everyone taking sides - there was no foothold for me.
No matter how many facts I read, no matter how many stories I watch, I know that I am looking at trauma. Layer upon layer, generation upon generation, of ancient grudges, ancestral suffering, and the endless reanimation of unhealed psycho-spiritual wounding.
And all of us watching. And all of us sort of humming together. And, in this humming, medicine is being made.
The way that honey is made — not by one bee alone. And not by the Queen. Honey is made by all the bees working (and humming) together.
When my husband and I try to talk about what’s happening in Israel we sound like a puzzle with missing pieces. “I read this editorial,” he says.
“Tell me.” I turn to listen. We discover, to our frustration, that he is unable to quite put his finger on what it was that he read.
A ‘senior moment’, he calls it. But after he leaves the room, I wonder: What if this inability to understand what’s happening in the Middle East is not the fault of aging or fading cognitive skills?
What if no one actually understands it?
I used to imagine that I was just bad at history. Though I was blessed with an extraordinary (some said photographic) memory, I was entirely and inexplicably unable to remember lists of dates, heroic skirmishes and battles. Yet, when a friend shared a story, I remembered everything.
I realized later, that it wasn’t my memory that was faulty - it was the nature of the narrative, presented as a string of strategic maneuvers on a game board. Offered this way, sanitized of human suffering, war history feels dead. There’s no life there and without life, there’s no story to grasp onto. Noone to care about. It’s presented as a game: plastic pieces clicking across cardboard. No blood. No bodies. No one is howling.
That kind of war is SO much easier to sell and to consume. It’s easier to get people to take sides - and take up arms. Easier to transform those we don’t agree with into enemies. Of course, dehumanizing others also dehumanizes us. We feel less. Grow numb - even to our own feeling life. Trusting no one but our own, we experience less - we are a little less alive.
The only way I can tell you how I’m feeling is to tell you stories.
Like this one, which happened last week to a member of Journey, my Wednesday Noon Zoom Circle when a tattooed white supremacist showed up at her son’s little league game. He arrived with his little daughter. He wasn’t doing anything wrong - yet with the white supremacist tattoos, his very presence was a provocation. Uneasy, distracted from the game, she called her partner, who told her, “Look, that guy has dedicated his literal body to communicating what he believes.”
Yes but… what should I do? She wondered. She sat with all of this for 45 minutes. Then something shifted. “Nobody hates spontaneously,” she thought. “Somebody that has that much hatred must have so much hurt.”
She couldn’t help making that shift. Her own goodness had to intervene. It is outside of her nature to be hateful, to be out of alignment for that long. “Can I go a little bit bigger?” she asked herself. She could —and she did.
I tell you this not because I think we should do nothing. I tell you this to point to some things that seem important now:
This is not the eclipse of everything good. I know this because you are still here and you are, at the foundational, bone-deep level, good. This gives me hope.
Healing is our natural first impulse - so take care of yourself, love. Call your attention back from fear and condemnation and return to love. Healing is the simplest thing. We do it all day long. We return and return to love.
Stay with Love. When we are with love, we feel safer, more spacious inside. When our hearts are spacious, there is more room for others. When you are with love, you are humming and more sweet medicine is added to the hive.
We are all doing a great deal of emotional and psychological labor right now So, at least for now, just staying whole and calm may be all we can do. That’s okay. Given how the world is, and how we, personally, respond to shock events, it’s okay if all we can manage to do is NOT get into an argument with a white supremacist at a little league game.
(And sure, it would be lovely if the white supremacist saw the error of his ways and had his tattoos redrawn into bouquets of reconciliation but that is not necessary for US to return to love.)
That said, we need to take care of each other.
On that same call, another group member, speaking from a social justice perspective, reminded us that, “by choosing to decorate his body in these ways, this man has chosen to always be putting that message out. So, while we’re doing our inner work, we also need to take care of the people being targeted because the non-active energy of those symbols - that is very real. And if there was, say, a black family there, you know they were feeling it. So, calling it out as a white person, in whatever way — you don't have to go up to the guy and pick a fight but in what ways that you can— it’s important. We need to speak to others to say, ‘I see this and I don't agree with it,’ so they don't feel alone.”
In a way, we are all holding the world together with our attention right now. In a way, this is the most important thing we can do. This means that when other people fall outside of the zone of our caring, we need to go and get them. We need to call them back into the circle. We need to say: ‘I see this and I don't agree with it.’
I didn’t hear about’ Hamas’s attack on Israel until the day after it happened. I noticed that a friend who normally only posts photos of her grandchildren was suddenly posting desperate demands that, “We supported you in your time of need. Where are you now?”
Oh, no. I thought. What happened? Horrified I read the reports. I see this and I don’t agree with it.
At the same time, it disturbed me that people were already polarizing into ‘you’re either with us or against us”? The attack had just happened. People needed time to absorb the shock wave - time to feel, to think, to respond.
That night - maybe the next - I dreamed that I was walking through a building with my husband. We were headed toward a gathering in the next room when suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Clutching my throat, “Wait,” I rasped, as I slid down the wall, gasping through the narrowing passage at the back of my throat.
Was this dream related to that other time I lost my voice? Of course it was.
If I did have something to say, I would speak of grief and loss and the profound absurdity of war - pointless senseless endless stupid violence. I would ask if we are really going to end the world because our next door neighbor cannot agree with our story of who should be president?
I would ask myself: What kind of world do I want to live in? Then, without demanding that you or anyone else change, or listen to me, or do anything at all, I would devote myself to building the world of love.
Doing this would mean that I would have to grow up. Not so much that I get all wrinkly yet - I mean, just enough that I can look my enemy in the eye and realize: Oh, you are suffering too.
Which leads me to this other story that I, weirdly, want to tell you.
Before my husband and I were married —so, we were maybe 25, 26 — we had this Saturday night ritual. We’d walk down to Austin Street, in Forest Hills, where we lived, and we’d go out to eat at this pop-up chef’s restaurant with six tables and a small open kitchen. We brought our own wine. They served amazing food. We’d linger for an hour. Then, tipsy and warm inside, we’d go to the movies.
This one night, only an animated children’s film was playing. The Never Ending Story, which turned out to be about the end of the world. I have never forgotten it.
This morning, I asked my husband if he remembered.
“I just remember a kid - a boy on the back of a bird,” he said. “I think it was a dragon. And there was a princess or maybe she was a queen…”
Intrigued, I looked it up. Here’s the story.
One day, a shy outcast named Bastian is chased by bullies after school. He escapes into a bookstore where, while hiding in the stacks, he discovers a mysterious book with a captivating story.
It seems that a magical queendom called Fantasia is slowly being devoured by The Great Nothing. As Bastian reads along, two heroes join forces to save Fantasia but after giving it all they have, the heroes find themselves floating in a void with only small fragments of Fantasia remaining.
All seems lost until they spot a small fragment containing the Empress's Ivory Tower. They step through the fragment and enter the tower, where the Empress assures them that they have succeeded. It seems that a human child (Bastian) has been reading along! A child who can save the world with his own imagination! And all he must do is call out the Empress’s new name. This will show that he believes Fantasia is real. Bastian will save them all!
Shocked at being spoken to directly— by name!—Bastian slams the book closed. But eventually, the Empress finds a way to reach him. Bastian runs to the window and calls out her new name: “Moon Child." And just like that, he saves the world.
You can see why I love this story. I was schooled on fairy tales. I grew up to teach dreaming. I have a Magic School!
I know imagination can save the world. But only if we don’t close the book. Only if we have the courage to call out the Empress’s new name.
"Do you believe in fairies?” J. M. Barrie, asked, from the pages of Peter Pan. “Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!”
This is part of the pattern - a collage we are making together, collecting fragments that are floating in the air around us all.
It’s trying to tell us something. Something about waking up to the realization that when hate splits the world, apathy fills the split apart spaces with a great nothing. Something about courage and even when we don’t know what to say, following our instincts back to love.
Earlier this week, someone told me, “There are demons who are so opposed to our enlightenment that they attack us when we seem to be about to share the good news of a world of love.”
I felt my shoulders sag. My head fell into my hands. Seriously?
At the same time, something in my heart woke up: It’s time, I thought. I knew what this was: I’d been called. It was time to clap my hands. In this case, clapping my hands brought me to this story …
… which I’ve never told before. To anyone. Well, only my husband but, for reasons I have not yet understood, this week, I spoke it out loud to my therapist.
My beautiful mother was programmed by systematic cult abuse, to believe that if she spoke of what was done to her, she would be punished - by her own mind. They set it up so she would punish herself. I can’t think of anything more despicable.
As a result, she sometimes had trouble speaking — but she was brilliant and resourceful and so freaking powerful. She put it all into poetry. Into paint. Into gorgeous culinary masterpieces. Into her garden. Her home. She put it into me - and into my sisters. Which is how my mother saved the world.
“There’s a lot of hurt out there,” I told the person who believed that evil spirits are trying to wipe out light.
“I want to help,” she said.
“You can!” I said. “Your heart is made to love.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m too sick. Too old. Too broken.”
“Help from where you are,” I told her. “Save the world from bed, from the doctor’s office, from the sofa. Stop fighting evil spirits and instead crowd them out of reality with beauty and love and healing. Start now. Right where you are.”
Clap your hands. Name the Moon Queen. Hum with me now . . .
“There’s no escape, no exit,” my therapist told me. And I laughed and laughed. I knew just what she meant.
There is no other better world. Stay with this one.
She meant: Here you are. This is it. Let yourself feel it - the grief, the outrage, the full catastrophe.
All of this will teach you. Make you stronger. You will learn to tolerate the disruption. The insult. All of this will help you become what you most long to be. Not a brand. Not perfect - but Anthropos, a fully enfleshed material being who is also infused with consciousness (aka light).
A living expression of divine love, right here. In the middle of our messy modern world. In front of everyone.
I am having this conversation with myself but you can listen in. I am asking myself:
Can you become the world of love - right here, right now, just as you are? No matter the conditions and circumstances of your human life. No matter what you do and do not yet understand.
Can you fill with light in front of everyone you know? Can you stand, infused with power and glowing? Can you continue to love, refusing to make anyone - or anything into an enemy?
If so, begin.
If not, what medicine, what miracle are you waiting for? Become that medicine, that miracle. This is the soul call.
What to do when you are shocked by events in the world (and/or when you don’t know what to say)
Shhh… You don’t have to say anything. Honor your inclination. Sit inside of the silence. Tend to your own heart. The put your own oxygen mask on first principle applies here.
Reach for a friend - not for an enemy. You don’t need someone to blame. This is no one person’s fault. Not the president. Not the terrorist. Not you. Lean into a soft embrace and howl until you can sigh. Sigh until you can chuckle. Even a little.
Resist becoming triggered for as long as you can. Resist taking sides. What happens when you hold both points of view in your consciousness at the same time?
Inhale Power. Inhale Color. Blue. Purple. Orange and Green. Look up at the sky and notice everything, exhaling blessing, exhaling gratitude, exhaling only peace.
Stay Soft. Be meticulously tender with your own heart. Do not toughen up. Hardening your heart will not help with this kind of pain. Open to it - noticing that, from inside of your silence, you are already opening.
Stay with Love. Bring beauty and healing where you are. This is the work. This is the soul call. This is what you’ve been waiting for.
What can I do? I wrote in my notebook. Keep living, I wrote a moment later. Let this be your mantra. I am here. Now. This is it. Whatever comes, I am ready to meet it. With Love, xxoo Amy
I have nothing to sell you this week. If you want to learn more about my work, this is my Magic School. This is my About Page.
These posts by smart people spoke to me this week:
As ever and always, I'm so grateful for you, Amy. For your words, your thoughts, your generosity, your heart. <3
This post sang in the language of my heart. I am so nourished by this mirroring river of yes.