When the weight of the world causes you to constrict, the radical choice is to dilate, look closer, feel more not less. For it is feeling which moves us to action, and action which will bring about the changes we are all longing to see in the world.
If we have an illness in our body, we do not heal it by pretending it doesn’t exist. We will heal it by paying attention and by carefully observing the disease process so that we understand how to respond and care for ourselves most effectively.
What we are facing in the outer world right now is no different. The crimes against humanity our government is committing in broad daylight, the escalating gun violence we are experiencing in public spaces, the repeal of vital protections for sacred places and endangered species—these are all symptoms of the same illness—symptoms of our disconnection from one another and from the land. This illness is one we must all respond to, with whatever medicine we carry in this life.
You are here because you have a vital
role to play in the healing of the world.
Even with all of your hurts and heartache, your fears and imperfections, you are needed urgently. These things exist within each of us without exception, and they exist alongside the most precious gifts and powerful resources that the world has ever seen.
It is time to get out of our own way and to share our medicine with the world. Regardless of if we are ready, regardless of if we believe we are worthy. As my friend Mariee Sioux reminds us in her song Morning Birds:
“We’re all fucking nuts, but
the future still depends on us.”
Our ancestors knew this time would come, and now it is here. Their wisdom lives within us. We can access it at any time through entering the silence, through listening to our dreams, through offering our love and tears and prayers and presence to the place where we stand and the land before our feet. The old ways are not lost; they are being reborn.
This is a critical moment in the unfolding history of our planet when we are tasked with the decision of what the next era of life on earth will look like. The outcome will depend on each of us and the actions we choose to take right now.
We are bound together by a
sacred responsibility to the Earth.
We are bound together by a sacred responsibility to the Earth. Our fate is inextricably interwoven with the waters, with the salmon, with the old growth forests, with one another. Each of us is a thread in the tapestry of this world, seemingly separate, but unbroken upon closer inspection.
Our reality is coming apart at the seams, but perhaps this is not such a bad thing, for the fiber it is made from remains strong, intact, salvageable. When one thread comes loose, the unraveling of the whole happens more quickly than you might think. And suddenly in your hands, you find the strands of infinite possibility—ready to be woven anew.
Whatever you feel called to do right now—don’t wait, and don’t worry that it will not be enough or that you will not be enough. Just start where you are, and the next step will reveal itself. For sometimes we must unravel things a bit before we know what we will be asked to weave anew.
