Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 89
Day 89
Lately I’ve been losing steam. It’s hard to write about what’s going on moment by moment, day by day when all I can think about is how Black Lives Matter. The young Black leaders speaking truth to power and versing forth prophetic visions of a world built on community rather than control.
I feel a yearning to spend my time in deep reflection and further education. I feel a yearning to be still, silent and slow. A longing to drop down into my belly, and further still into my pelvis, and further still into my legs and the earth that holds me here.
I feel a longing to drop my energy in and down and simply feel my feelings and allow whatever action comes next to emerge from that place deep inside that knows what’s what and isn’t afraid of anything.
And yet another part of me feels the pull to keep going. To make sure to document as much as I can of this time. And everyday someone else reaches out, saying how helpful they find it, hearing from me, my reflections and outbursts and moments of clarity.
Today was the last day of an online retreat I’ve been leading. My calendar still thinks I’m getting on a plane to California. Instead I’m here in London with $400 of credit with Alaska Airlines that I must use by March 2021.
I was meant to be going on retreat with my friend and teacher Viveka. I was meant to be going to the mountains to sit beside friends who’ve known me for as long as I’ve been Singhashri and longer. To sit together in silence and feel deeply the presence of one another.
To keep going deeper together. We love being on retreat together. In silence for a month sitting together and eating together and walking together. Touching the earth together.
We love being on retreat together. The rituals swelling with heart, spontaneous dance, guttural mantras, fierce prostrations. The stillness afterwards. Walking slowly back to our tents together, saying good-night with the eyes.
My friend Vimalamoksha had a vision of a shrine room in the woods. He then went to those woods and manifested that vision and this was where I would have been going if it weren’t for coronavirus.
So today, more than ever, I hate coronavirus and I resent the interruption to my life, so violently enacted. It snuck up on us, didn’t it? First the here-and-there news reports of a virus in China. Something so bad a whole city had been shut down. No one in, no one out.
A few weeks later it was in northern Italy. Again, whole towns closed down. Videos of Italians singing to each other from their balconies on my Facebook feed.
Then the news it had come to France. A cluster at a ski resort in the Alps.
Then there was one person in Britain who had it. Part of that cluster in France. Just one.
Two weeks later we were in lockdown. Collective denial turned absolute obedience on a dime overnight.
Today I am teaching about what else is possible when clinging ceases. When we stop trying to control our experience and start trusting what is naturally emerging, spontaneously and continuously, in the great, open space of luminous awareness.
Today I am teaching about resting in that space. Familiarising ourselves with the place from which experience arises and passes. Which is also not separate from awareness. Which we are also not separate from.
We meditate together, say good-bye and end with a ritual. What do we feel ready or are getting ready to let go of, transform, liberate?
Then I’m hosting a drop-in meditation class. Viveka is the guest teacher. She shows up raw and tender. She’s a social justice warrior on the frontlines of the Black Lives Matter movement.
She recites a spontaneous poem:
Today I am a student of sorrow
And a student of joy
There she goes again with that teaching that I also now teach. Both/and. So much more liberating than either/or. I am both completely confused and totally awake. The world is both achingly beautiful and painfully tragic. People are both deeply flawed and completely perfect.
At family cocktail hour my sister is telling us about her 43 year old patient who is intubated and on an ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation). That’s the machine they put you on when your lungs stop working altogether.
He’s got three kids and a wife. Now preconditions. In order to be a viable candidate for a lung transplant he’s got to be walking. But right now he’s unconscious with tubes the size of garden hoses coming out of his neck and groin.
The road to recovery for these kinds of patients is long and hard and doesn’t necessarily lead to a life worth living. Depends on who you are, how hard you fight, and who you’ve got beside you along the way.