What will make me feel better?
So far, unsuccessful answers include social media, more coffee, re-inventorying my shoe drawer, checking to see if my tax refund has found me (it has not), changing clothes, brushing my teeth again, and Texts of Despair.
I seem to have reached a pivotal point at the intersection of simultaneous sadness, anger, and fear whereby I’m no longer able to *just push through it*. I’ve put myself on do not disturb, disengaged the computer from the wifi, and wonder what sorts of answers might make their way through my vessel into words that offer you entertainment or solidarity. You’ve been here, too. Maybe you’re here now, with me, with the vast majority of us who are frayed and fried, having pushed through the chaotic and emotionally expensive time of 45, violence, global pandemics, and pervasive and destructive isms: race, capital, sex.
Sadness.
Anger.
Fear.
I find myself longing for the feminist version of the Gita - sure, we know Arjuna was up against insurmountable odds, getting a pep talk about 'how to dharma' against a formidable and unethical foe when all he really wanted to be was a flautist or a carpenter. Share his gifts, but circumstances required him to get really fucking creative.
For all of it’s gifts and insights, the patriarchy is still strong in the spiritual song, and I’m finding it less helpful than I have in more certain times. The Before. The place where I used to be reasonably certain that someone had their shit together in the moments when I did not.
This raw time is so new. I really think so. The yogic theory of being intricately and intimately connected is gorgeous, but the execution of global and instantaneous overload is varsity, and not by practice but by necessity. It was cute when we were just blogging or dabbling in distraction by way of endless quizzes and Reddits, but now we are navigating an intergalactic ocean with a compass that only tells us where North once was, back in an old paradigm of four dimensions of travel.
No one has their shit totally together, not by a landslide, even if they have a virtual coaching program where they promise to show YOU how to turn your mayhem into money, in only six minutes a day.
Now the directions are infinite and limitless, and it feels impossible to retrace invisible footprints through stardust. The origami we’ve made of the space time continuum has left us universally ungrounded, hoping to stick to the nearest large object.
We are now lost in the siddhis of bilocation - zoom meetings that transport us instantly from parent teacher conferences to yoga to board meetings with virtual backgrounds that disguise the disarray of our circumstances and place us Anywhere But Here. In one day I can be everywhen, as I live and die by the sanctity of my time zone converter.
Ok, if it’s 6am in Jerusalem, what time is it **really**?
I’m not sure anymore.
But I can share what I’ve gathered, the paradoxical moment towards the end of The Never-ending Story, when everything that once was distilled itself into a tiny grain of sand of potential. It ain’t much, but it’s what I’ve got.
I still believe in gravity. Not that there is a magic that holds me to the earth, but that the earth and I are in agreement that we are both better served by sticking together.
I believe that community is possible anywhere, anyhow in the same context. Not by the dominance of one force on the other, but the mutual agreement that we were never meant to do this solitary journey in isolation.
And I believe that we can do this virtually, connected via Zoom tethers, without cameras or microphones or chat, and unfold a tiny corner of that which was within us.
(which probably means this is equally possible without that magic)
And so? I suppose this is what makes me feel better - the knowing that I thought and wrote these things, and that they have migrated to you via pixels, blowing past the algorithms that would otherwise keep us apart.
How ‘bout you?
prakṛtim svām avastabhya visrjami punaḥ punaḥ
(curving back on myself, I create again & again) BG Ch 9 verse 8