Unfiltered Hope
The heavens are crying, the earth is convulsing, and the temperature sits at 54 degrees fahrenheit. Today is Sunday.
The rain is tapping on windows here and the skies have not yet started to light up. This weekend was full of people and poetry in motion. The idea that we can live through a time of dismantling and disappearances has come. Things have been known to be broken - or at least in need of serious repair - but the speed with which "the fix" has come is overwhelming.
Thankful to know there are among us, those who have been through this before and came out stronger for the experience. Maybe not happily, but certainly with more depth of understanding and appreciation for what the experiences of the past taught: there is excitement in the work of building unity, unfiltered hope and determination, and then there are fractures that happen – almost every time. What happens after the fracture? This is where the choice arises: Have you learned anything? Will you repeat the same mistake or can we now move on to deepening our relations?
That's it. Relations. Without the ability to see ourselves in the other, we make another mistake and have to start over again. Each of us exists in every other person who is a part of our world, and we must have the ability to see ourselves in every other form on this planet, be it the natural elements in our streams, oceans, and rivers as well as our forests and deserts, or in the mountains that remind us of our place in the scheme of things. Relations – we call on all of them in this moment.
They serve as our sources. The sources of unfiltered hope that is our lifeline in this moment.
Yesterday, being part of another conversation about race relations, it was clear that the problem persists in our inability to reach beyond the small self that forgets that all people have their rituals, ceremonies, and ways in which community is knit together and made coherent. The challenge lies in how to knit the different communities together so that humanity as One can be realized. Talks about race keep pulling us back to an unconscious and powerful tendency to seek safety believing it exists in only our racial, ethnic, religious, and other ways we name our identity. The dilemma of the fact that relations broke down around race and our need to overcome the differences that tend to define our paths in life – remains.
"We go at the speed of trust." is what one person stated as an axiom of how to build relations. But there is a nagging question: Who is trusting and how do you understand "trust"?
How about going at the speed of guidance? That guidance comes from relations beyond what we see or think we know. That guidance is always being offered, not by any particular set of relations, but by all relations. It is an energy that has the power to animate all that needs to come into being. Guidance is beyond our consciousness - it moves in our collective unconscious and we know it when it comes. For now, we could call it unfiltered hope.