Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 104

This one’s going to be another round-up of the last few days.

The other night I had an impossible dream. My mother was still alive and had always been and in the dream I carried the memories of all the times we’d spent together over the years of my adult life.

We’d grown out of the strife of my teenage years, she’d accepted my queerness, we’d had many, many conversations about it over the years. She loved my partner almost as much as I did. They had a relationship of their own.

She’d come to visit me when I lived in San Francisco and I’d taken her to the one and only Chilean restaurant in town. She rated it.

She had become a Black Lives Matter activist, getting the white Irish and Italian people in her local Catholic Church involved in solidarity prayers and protests and BLM bake sales.

In the dream she’s driving me and my brother to the airport. We’re running late and I’m anxious. When we get to the terminal I jump out of the car and run into the airport without saying good-bye.

My brother is lagging behind, making a big fuss over saying good-bye to my mom and I immediately feel ashamed I didn’t take the time to say good-bye so I yell back at them, calling out to her but she can’t hear me over all the airport noise.

Sometimes I wonder if there really are alternate dimensions where we live the other possible lives we might have had if the things that have defined us had turned out differently.

And every once in a while, in that liminal space of sleep where we are not conscious but still breathing, our brains working hard to process all the information of our waking lives, the veil between dimensions lifts and the consciousnesses of all these different versions of ourselves merge.

At family cocktail hour on Friday my sister updated us on her patients. Both the 49-year-old and the 43-year-old didn’t make it.

Meanwhile nurses from Florida who were furloughed had traveled to northern cities like Chicago and Boston to help out with the COVID peak back in April. Now they are being called back to work because Florida is peaking.

I’m finding it hard to imagine how or if this is ever going to end. I didn’t consider that lockdown could be a forever thing when I started this blog.

The government is meant to be lifting travel restrictions on the 4th of July, so we’ve been fantasizing about renting a car and driving north, staying on the coast for a few days and then heading to Scotland to visit my partner’s father.

Today is day 104. That’s roughly 15 weeks. Almost four months.

The number 108 holds particular significance in the yogic and Buddhist traditions. Malas (prayer beads) are often strung with 108 beads, one per each round of a mantra. It is a number associated with spiritual completion.

I’ve been thinking about ending this blog on the 108th day of lockdown. I’ve got other things I need to be getting on with writing about and a whole lot of self-study to do around all things Black Lives Matter.

I’ve got emerging teaching activities, events, groupings, imaginings calling for my attention.

Last night we watched Just Mercy, the 2019 film based on the book by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. It’s a magnificent film, everything done to perfection from acting to cinematography to writing to editing.

At the end, like so many films based on true stories, you see photos of the real people portrayed in the film with captions telling you what happened to them.

When we learn what happened to Anthony Ray Hinton I completely lose it. The footage of him emerging from the courthouse a free man, after spending 30 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit is heartbreaking.

The way his loved ones embrace him, the way they cry together. I can’t imagine the combination of relief and frustration. There are no words.

My throat clenches and there is a split second where I know what this is and I don’t want to feel it. The part of me that wants to shut it down, not let myself feel the fullness of it reaches up from the depths of my belly and tries to squash it but I see it coming and I say, “Not this time.”

I double over in grief.

I double over and for a good long time I stop breathing, the contraction in my chest is so strong. And then I sob and sob. And sometimes there is a voice saying, “You shouldn’t be feeling this so badly, it didn’t happen to you, it has nothing to do with you.”

And sometimes there’s another voice saying, “I’m human and this has everything to do with me.”

I hear a wise whisper saying, “The only way to stay grounded in your convictions is to feel all of it.”

This voice is inviting me to recognise this moment of suffering and greet it with open arms. When the grief wells up so hard it feels like it could rip me in two, I’m invited to welcome it and trust it to guide me.

These days grief’s companion is gratitude. I learned how to feel grief at an early age. I taught myself to bear it over the years my mother was sick and dying. I let myself have it in its fullness because a wiser part of me knew the only way out was through.

This is why I know that to do the work of undoing systemic racism we have to feel the injustice of it deep in our bones. We have to know the pain of it as our own, even if we have never experienced it directly.

The gratitude is for that younger, and oftentimes braver, part of me who recognised grief as a facet of my humanity and knew that to deny it was to cut off from myself and from what connects me to every other human being on the planet.

Since the murder of George Floyd and the rage that’s emerged in and around me, I have been surprised that my response does not include despair.

Instead, I have felt hope, a hope grounded in the courage I see in the faces of the young Black activists carrying us into a different future than the ones our leaders are preparing for us.

A hope that’s grounded in the clarity I carry of what I might contribute to this moment and the joy I get from moving forward in that direction.

So although we’ve been on lockdown for almost four months during a global pandemic and racial injustice is at the top of the agenda, I’m full of hope, and joy, and curiosity about what the future holds.

This is what’s carrying me through these days and makes life seem so much stranger and more precious than ever before.

This is what’s carrying me though.