On Comforting Ourselves & The World

plus a new poem just for you

Photo by Ivan Vranić on Unsplash

Friends,

I’m coming to you with so much love and care right now—we need it. Sometimes I wish I was a more harsh person, that I handled things with more gusto, more rage, like maybe I process things in a wrong or weak way.

I know it’s not a helpful way to think, but if I’m being honest with you, it’s what I’m thinking about deep down lately. And I also remember that rage is experienced in different ways by many of us. How do we hold our rage? How do we work our way through it? What is injustice-fueled rage’s essence in our lives?

How do we handle this time we are living in? It’s the same question repeated again and again: how do we get through this together, and are we playing our part in the change?

Quite a few years back, I was on a panel for a speaking event. When I saw a video of the panel later, I was horrified to realize that when I wasn’t speaking and was listening to the other panelists, I was swaying from side to side—left to right, left to right—as I listened, as I processed and prepared my own words.

I found that I did the same thing when I was in the North of Ireland last year—in our closing session, as I was deeply processing what we’d been through together over the last week, I was swaying again—left to right, left to right.

My newfound friend Miriam pointed it out to me, but in a beautiful way. She thanked me for swaying, for showing this form of comfort-making in an exhausting but beautiful environment.

Now I notice it more often in my daily life, when I take to swaying left to right, when I notice that I need some space to breathe, when I notice that I need to slow down and comfort myself, slow down and focus.

I still get embarrassed by it, that I’m sitting here in a coffee shop outside Philly swaying left to right as I read a book that I’m endorsing later, as I write to you here.

Left to right, left to right.

---

This week is the Spring Equinox, a liminal space, a shifting time when the veil thins a bit and we show up to the world differently. Of course, it’s a perfect day to read my new book, Spring’s Miracles, to ask what it means to embrace your questions, your bravery, to take deep breaths to the four directions.

Order the book here.

So, I invite you into rituals of comfort, of paying attention, in a world that wants us to stretch our attention in a desperate attempt to to completely burn out in the process.

Paying attention to your breath is not selfish.

Facing your fears is not selfish.

Protecting the world you know is not selfish.

Swaying left to right is not selfish.

Slowly drinking that cup of coffee is not selfish.

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This is the point in my life when I, ironically (or maybe it’s not ironic at all), come back to my own writing to remind myself of who I am. I can convince you as my reader to take care of yourself, to find your place in the weary world. And to a certain extent, we are always writing to ourselves as authors, too.

So here, I ask myself if I’ve taken my own advice. Am I trusting myself to make my own way in the world, trusting my gifts, the words I’m writing to you here, that they are enough, that they matter? Does this matter?

Order my book Living Resistance here.

I must care about the earth. I must care about my trans kin being targeted. I must care about Mahmoud and his precious wife who is waiting for his return in agony. I must care for my friends of other religions who experience hate crimes; anti-semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments every day of their lives. I must care about my Indigenous kin, about the rights of Black voters, about the history of Japanese internment camps and about how immigrants are being targeted by this administration. I must care about disability rights in a nation built on ableism and the ways we take advantage of the poor and prop up the wealthy. I must care.

And I’m not finished, I could go on and on, the list never-ending because we must care about one another. I must, we must care about all of it.

And we must focus our energy on what we can hold space for, and we must sway back and forth a little along the way.

See the rhythms, the progression, the dance, the constant ebb and flow? See the ways we are all connected?

I’m not giving you a permission slip to care about yourself. Permission slips are temporary, and I want you to care about your well-being forever.

Tear up the permission slip.

This is about sustaining a life of fierce love, tender care, and community action.

This is about a life of resistance, of deep breathing, of stretching to love.

Stretch with me, friends.

We are all we’ve got.

---

I finished reading another
book on Spiritual Matters,
and you’d think that afterward
I’d feel all high and mighty, 
like I was floating on clouds
above everyone else, a goddess
of cosmic wisdom. 

Instead I feel as if I’ve been
dipped in a river, maybe 
baptized there, or maybe settled
deep into a cave where every
word I read now settles with
me for a few years until I truly
understand their meaning. 

It is no use trying to come up
with ways to be the wisest one
in the room; after all, we are here
recycling and repurposing each
other's stories in hopes that this
particular dose of medicine might
be the one you actually needed 
for your weary heart.

Instead, we sink deeper, allowing
all that medicine we’ve consumed 
to do its work, to change us, to
enter our bloodstream and make us
into the versions of ourselves we
hope are just like the mystics that
pray for God to be found among them,
in the lowly places where the meek
inherit everything.