Some people can't go home again
Some places make us, others break us
Hello friends,
How are you?
OK, yep. We’ll come back to that.
When Birdseed began, the dispatches were pithy. In being pithy, they were prickly and sparkly. Meant to prick or spark thoughts, feelings, + ideas. Connect some dots, but not sketch a well-shaded elephant. Once you’ve published (but not before)
tells you how long a read your piece is. Early Birdseeds were one to three minutes and recent ones are around 10.I’m throwing it back to the pith today. This is, like, the most trite understatement of the century but, there is just SO MUICH that everyone is dealing with right now. I don’t know how anyone has time or energy or brain space to do anything. I can feed my dog. I can keep my child alive. I can take out the recycling. Sometimes that feels like about it.
So many horrific images and realities occupying the nooks of our brains and chambers of our hearts. There are active genocides ongoing, some of which our countries are actively arming. There are wars dragging on so long people seem to forget. There are natural disasters decimating places we thought were unreachable.
I don’t need to go on, because I know you know. I am sure, like me, you’re struggling to make sense of this alongside the beautiful details of your own life, which may stand in stark contrast, or which may also include its own devastations. A freaking lot.
How to process or go on, let alone make meaning? At times like these, which is all the time, I take solace in ancient practice, wisdom, and community ritual. As Lama Rod said last month:
“So much is falling apart right now. And this is why I have often called this an age of apocalypse. But apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world. It means unveiling. It means truth telling.
So when we’re grounded in authentic practice, we’re able to show up to hold this falling apart; to respond to this falling apart in deep, liberatory care for ourselves, for our ancestors, for our descendents, for our communities, for the land and the earth.
And when we respond in liberatory care like this, then we transform this period into an age of decolonization. And decolonization is how we’re going to get free.”
OK, so we are in an unveiling. Some things about that framing that work for me:
It is a gerund. That means a verb functioning as a noun. But deep down it’s a verb. It’s a moving, breathing, living process. So it’s constantly changing. There’s dynamism to it. There is slow but incremental deepening in knowing, seeing, and understanding.
It is a movement toward truth. This means a dawning. The opportunity, through practice, to continue to ask yourself:
What are you noticing around you? New synergies, new twinnings, new chasms.
What emotions are arising? How do they feel in your body and what are you doing with them?
What is your relationship with play, creativity, or release?
Have you cultivated or called in a network of people who love you for you and see you fully? Who doesn’t fit any longer, and who else might join the party?
If you found out tomorrow that you had a terminal illness and six weeks left to live, what does that unveil to you?
This is still a heavy, heartbreaking time. So please take good care. What that means will constantly change, so you can decide how to do that for yourself and others. Space, in the form of time, quiet, and breath, is never not a good idea. You can never have too much space when you are processing the grievous.
Last week, after three years away, I went home again. Many people cannot go back home because of wildfires or mudslides or fire bombs or the fact that they just…. cannot. So it is a gift to be able to go back home, though it isn’t easy.
When you go back home you are every age again at once, as a dear one put it.
Imagine! All your unformed selves, evolving gremlins, stuffed inside one another like a a soul wearing a costume of a human wearing a costume wearing a costume and so on. All at once. They’re always there with you, of course, but when you “go back home” they all seem to come back to life.
One thing about my self now and at every previous age is that I’m a devout devourer of published reality: reality TV, docu-series, documentaries, and memoirs to name a few of reality’s iterations. Another thing about my self, especially from ages 9-12, is that I have loved the Medieval and Renaissance periods. LOL because that’s a total of about 1200 years. But it’s true. I somehow love the short, brutish, and feudal reality of the Medieval times (wait, does this sound familiar?) as well as the merriment and relief in the Renaissance.
So on the plane ride home, all my selves converged in bliss as I watched Ren Faire, a three episode docu-series on the Texas Renaissance Festival (the nation’s largest). Thank god my son slept for basically three hours— he knew I needed this!
Ren Faire was… truly wild. It’s shot in this cinematic way that had me double checking that it was reality and follows the unhinged but I guess also brilliant (?) (and very rich) 86-year-old founder and owner dubbed “King George.” There is blind devotion. There is literal tyranny. There is sexism. There is dominant culture. There is gluttony. There is unabashed capitalism. There is make-believe.
It has everything our society loves and protects.
Renaissance festivals seem to offer the perfect mix of nostalgia, entertainment, and escapism.
Escapism. So tempting, and also so crucial. Especially in an apocalypse and unveiling such as now. It is primal to seek to escape something soul crushing, oppressive, or even deeply uncomfortable. Discernment enables us to know, and we do always know, deep down, whether that escape is life giving or reality avoiding.
Even when you’re wide awake you must still blink. It’s OK to take breaks that support you to refuel resilience as you stay present.
The episodes ended and the plane landed, it was eventually over. Back to real reality, or at least this version of it.
Wishing you space to process, grieve, + rebuild in whatever corner of the unveiling you’re in. Take good care.
