Tag Archives: #TheResistance

Groundless in the Time of the Impossible

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While it seems impossible at first,

you soon recognize that with everything

there is a point of balance

and you just have to find it.

(Amy Tan)

Experience has shown me that in each day a point of balance exists no matter how pervasive the impossible.

I find my fulcrum in the unlikeliest of places. It means going groundless as Pema Chödrön calls it.

I must trust in myself, go all in. After all, becoming comfortable with “getting tossed around with right and wrong” is a lifetime experience (Chödrön). No two times are the same but with practice comes acceptance.

Less and less am I concerned with sides. If I’m on one, I am not on the other. I am separate. It seems to me that survival in this physical dimension relies on connecting separate shores.

Maybe staying connected is our #DailyDose of the impossible. After all, each of us is unique in our expression as a human being. We are born to difference but animated by the same energy. We are all star dust.

Each moment is mine to find my fulcrum, some days a tipping point, some days not.

Every day you may have broken

down in guilt and failure.

Every day may have shown you

your helplessness a thousandfold.

Yet each new day brings

new sun, new air, and new grace.

(Eberhard Arnold)

Groundless in the time of the impossible.

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.

Upside Down and Inside Out

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As I attempt to walk on my own again, my country seeks security somewhere, anywhere. Neither of us is sure of how far to go, much less where.

Yet, it is not our uncertainty that is the problem. We are right where we need to be, “unfolding a new myth” (Rumi).

“Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in Flight to Arras, a novel about the French Resistance in World War II. We know the outcome of that resistance but its success was far from assured.

Yet defeat—death–was preferable to life lived within a formula. Life turns on a dime— it is impermanent–change turns us upside down, inside out. And if we are Aleppo, we are all but obliterated.

“Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness.” That is the history of the human spirit, its rising from a story stuck in repeat. We don’t remember our history so we keep writing the same story.

But what if we strayed from that story? What if we accepted that life turns on a dime–always has, always will. We would walk where uncertainty leads. Would that not be the unfolding of a new myth?

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.

Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection,

despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree

I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes

too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless,

the awakening of resistance.

Life may grow from it as from a seed.

(Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry )

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.

Scrolling Screens By Night

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Today’s #LongView post, Always a Nasty Woman, is a bit about citizenship–what it means to live in a republic. It’s a lifetime responsibility. The Nasty Women Project brought out the activist in me.  Too long had I been complacent.

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.

 

Once in A While a Protest Post

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“Something there is that does not love a wall…” (Robert Frost).

No, not the wall specifically but all walls–any walls–put up under the mistaken belief that in isolation, life thrives. How can it? It exhausts its limited resources.

When we wall out what is on the other side, we lull ourselves into a false sense of security. We become self-righteous. Our way is the only way. There is no one way for everyone but for each of us there is a way.

No one label completely identifies who we are. We are walking contradictions, unique expressions of nature’s intentions. Nature cycles in seasons. No wall will hold it.

“Something there is that does not love a wall….”

Impermanence. No matter what side of the wall you and I live, the reigning administration is just happy the wall exists. And intends to keep it that way. Both sides have nostalgic fondness for a life that is gone. Why? No one and no one thing ever stays.

It is a painful loss, the life I think I had. Perhaps for you, too. If I look closely, I find complacency, privilege, and a lot more. I did nothing while the wall went up–maybe you did–I did not look so it did not exist.

My Zen reminds me daily, sometimes hourly: don’t attach to the pain of loss or you’ll get stuck in its drama. But late at night, scrolling through social media, I want my say.

But more than my snark, I want my country–again–what is left of it. There is a sliver of light in #TheResistance if both sides pull down the wall together. And that is a big if.

We must lay down our labels—put country above party—to effectively pressure Congress and the administration. And we are; it is hard work. We are Americans, not sunshine patriots.

“Something there is that does not love a wall….”

So, now in my late-night scrolling through social media I aspire to Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall.”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Mirror the apple orchard and pine forest who grow side-by-side, their purpose to drop their seeds for future generations— theirs a life larger than their own.

It’s simply good manners, this reverence for life. Before you laugh me away remember reverence is innate in nature. Only we must keep re-learning.

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.