A sparrow flew into the milking parlor this morning through the open barn door, the third one this week. She threw her tiny body against the glass as if her wings were on fire, as if to tell me, Come alive, the world is burning. A sparrow but it could have been a dove, a sparrow but it was my own beating heart escaped from my chest.
I emerge into the open morning, greeted by the pink blush of a flowering almond tree and the stark white blooms of the Satsuma plum standing alone on the hillside like a bride dressed for her wedding day. I think of the young couple who chose to marry in a refugee camp in Deir el-Balah despite bombs falling around them.
My blood is a red cord that connects me to the blood of every mother who has given birth with the menacing sound of drones overhead, to every child whose limbs have been torn from their body, to the blood of poets spilled into the earth by a sniper and to the sap of every ancient olive tree uprooted by an Israeli tank.
It has been almost five months now of bearing witness to the war on Gaza. Five months of devastation and disbelief. Five months of my heart being forged in the furnace of rage and washed in the river of grief which is never ending. With every fresh massacre, a new layer of illusion is burned away.
On Sunday, February 25th, 2024, twenty-five year old active duty US Air Force service member, Aaron Bushnell, burned himself alive in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. to protest the US government’s complicity in genocide. Imagine the depth of clarity and courage it takes to overcome one’s fear of death and the natural aversion to pain to sacrifice oneself in this way. It’s hard to even fathom.
I remember, as a young girl, the first time I saw a photograph of the Vietnamese monk, Thich Quang Duc, from 1963 sitting perfectly still in meditation in the middle of a street in Saigon, his body engulfed in flames. This is the way he chose to protest the brutal persecution of Buddhists by the government of Vietnam which was backed by the United States. I held the postcard in my hands unable to look away. The image seared into my mind.
Self-immolation actually has a long history as a means of resistance to state violence. It goes back many centuries. Between the years of 2009 and 2022 alone, over 160 monks, nuns and ordinary Tibetans self-immolated as a way to protest the occupation of their land and the systematic annihilation of their people and their culture by the Chinese government. There have been countless other instances of self-immolation by political dissidents in other countries in the last few decades that have been heralded as heroic by US politicians when it suited their agenda but, now that a member of our own military has done the same, they are saying he was not in his right mind. The corporate media has tried to spin this as a mental heath crisis and a random suicide rather than acknowledge what motivated this radical action.
The video of Aaron Bushnell standing tall and resolute in his military fatigues screaming “Free Palestine” as his body burned is indelibly imprinted in my consciousness. As he walked toward the Embassy that day to meet his destiny, he recorded these final words, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people are experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He then set himself on fire.
I am utterly shaken by this. We all should be.
In his last Facebook post the morning of his death, Aaron wrote, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
These words echo through the collective field, a call to tap into what we know in the marrow of our bones to be true and to stand for that truth, no matter what. “Courage” actually originates from the Latin cor meaning “of the heart” which is also the the root of coeur, the French word for heart. So courage quite literally means to “come from the heart”.
We are living in extraordinary times. We all feel it. So much is rapidly changing and, yet, familiar age old dynamics are playing out. War and oppression have existed on the Earth since the dawn of human civilization and have been as cyclical and constant as the seasons. Still, hearts yearn for peace, for justice. Right now, all across the planet, millions of hearts are breaking open, millions of human hearts, hearts seeing through the illusion of separateness. Gaza is the catalyst.
Systems of domination and control are being exposed. Imperialism and endless war are being rejected. This is bigger than any one political issue and yet, the genocide in Gaza is at the center of every struggle for liberation on Earth. Gaza is the moral imperative of our time.
Both rage and grief are natural human responses to children being exterminated, to tens of thousands of precious lives being erased and vibrant culture being stamped out, to fertile land being laid to waste. The immense loss is unfathomable. Feelings of helplessness are perfectly natural in the face of such enormity and seemingly inexorable forces that we cannot control. Indian philopsher, J. Krishnamurti, wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. You are not alone.
If your heart is being shattered by the gaze of children starving in Gaza, if you feel crushed by the wailing of widows and a Palestinian grandmother who lost her entire family of one hundred and eleven under the rubble, remember this—your tears matter. Your raw open heart is the birthplace of possibility. And yet, Audre Lorde asks the question, "How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded?” It feels almost unbearable sometimes. We are, afterall, just soft bellied mammals with nervous systems that are not evolved to handle a continual borage of horrors from half way around the world.
So how to do we stay present to the suffering of others and not either shut down and numb out or fall into a bog of despair? How do we give voice to our passion and yet guard against becoming so rigid and entrenched in our position that we begin to mirror the same toxic energy we claim to oppose? I’ve been sitting with these questions lately and, while there is no magic spell, I’m finding that the answer is rooted in practice.
In the midst of heartache, in the midst of all the chaos, resistance and division swirling around, there is a call to anchor into something greater than myself.
When I walk out into the Spring air, I feel the brittle edges within me begin to soften. I breathe deeper. Any anger, frustration or sorrow I had been harboring doesn’t, all of the sudden, just dissolve but things start to move when I more fully inhabit my body.
The alchemy of being in relation to the natural world has the power to transmute bitterness and despair into something sweeter. Coming across acorns scattered on the forest floor gives me a sense of tangible hope. An antler fallen on a bed of pine needles reminds me that there is a certain justice in the changing of seasons, a rightness to larger cycles and time frames. The Earth grounds me. Intimacy with the the wild iris reminds me of my own impermanence. It’s humbling. When I surrender to a deeper wisdom, I am able to shift from reactivity to receptivity. I remember that our destinies are intertwined.
I hear a lot of talk lately about not losing our humanity which we rightly associate with the qualities of empathy, kindness, forgiveness, compassion. So how is it that we can become severed from these aspects of our better nature?
Perhaps it happens little by little, in each singular moment that we abandon ourselves and turn away from feeling. Perhaps it’s in the walling off from Nature that we lose connection to our own precious selves and to each other. At first I wrote that line above as, perhaps it is in the cutting off from Nature that we lose connection but then I changed it. I don’t believe we can ever truly be cut off from the generative force of Nature because it is in us. It is us.
Any of us can get lost. When we look at those we deem to be aggressors, the distance between them and our self is littered with small choices. Layers upon layers of choices over time until the heart calcifies. That’s why we have to let our hearts break again and again and soften with tenderness and burn with love.
The breathing pulse of life moving through us is medicine. Awe is medicine. Standing silent in the morning light is medicine. Baths with rose petals, tea with honey, long meandering walks. However we each find our way home to ourselves is essential medicine. Practice is what keeps us from losing touch with the shared thread of our humanity.
At a time when there is so much self righteous argument and judgement flying around, it’s good to bring it back around to the simple truth that we are responsible for our own energy. Our presence has the power to either uplift and inspire or amplify and perpetuate negativity. How we show up is our offering to a broken world.
If we want those suffering under occupation to be free, we must also simultaneously work to free ourselves, from the inside out. Moment by moment. It requires the willingness to surrender to our limitations, to be with difficult feelings, to fall from grace and then find our way back again. It’s not easy, but if we can begin to embody the liberation we wish for others, our mere presence can heal.
Activism without love is unsustainable. Activism without softness and beauty and joy is unsustainable. As someone I love recently said to me, “The struggle for justice is a marathon not a sprint”. Resilience requires that we replenish and recalibrate and live as fully as we can along the way.
The more polarized and insane the human world becomes, the more pausing to behold a honey bee plunging into the pollen rich center of a scarlet poppy makes sense. Harmony is woven through the fabric of Nature. We are not separate from it. We just have to remember over and over again.
The world is hurting. Let us become the medicine. It’s not enough to simply stand in opposition to something. We have to know what it is that we love deep down, what set’s our hearts on fire for beauty, for creativity, for life. When we fan this flame within, we move through the world with a heart illuminated by love. We become a lamp in the darkness.
Come, gather around the coals of an ancient fire. Your siblings are there waiting for you and the creatures of the forest. Sparks spiral up toward the stars as the voices of our ancestors whisper ….
"The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire Your essence is gold hidden in dust To reveal it's splendor you need to burn in the fire of love." ⟡ Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
I love your writing. You effortlessly take me from place to place, from Gaza to acorns. I love spending time in your mind.