This is part of our protest
on endless ways to dip into the current of care
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A song I’m loving:
Last weekend, I started a new therapeutic learning path that feels a bit more like a homecoming than a beginning, one that has restored my sense of aliveness and devotion to my heart’s work in ways I am still integrating. At the end of the weekend together, we co-created a closing ritual; each of us sharing an object, memory, or movement that felt representative of something we want to carry forward from our time. Folks shared poems, photographs, prayers, meaningful rocks. I shared a beloved Mary Oliver book. Our teacher finished the ritual by reflecting on the loving presence, mindfulness, deep listening, connection, service, curiosity, and compassion we practiced together, and shared these words: “this is part of our protest.” A silence rippled into the space, a hush of resonance, a stillness symbolic of the deep places those simple words traveled. When I blinked, tears streamed out; little liquid lines of yes… yes… yes… this. This is part of our protest.
There are moments lately when I look out at the world and my anger, confusion, and grief feel like they’re going to bubble over and pour out, reaching everything in sight if I’m not careful. “Does it sort of feel like you’re a volcano, ready to erupt hot lava?” I ask my daughter when she’s trying to understand her anger, because I know. Then, there are moments where my rooted presence, gratitude, and sense of awe feel like they’re blanketing me so lovingly that I just know everything will be okay. It’s a wild thing, to be in a body that can hold it all: to move between the tender experience of shedding old, stale layers of the self to discover all that has been awaiting me underneath, right alongside the dissonance of seeing the chaos unfolding in the world and wondering, how did we stray so far from what matters?
This is part of our protest, I remember. The everyday choice to return to what matters, to return to ourselves and each other. The impact of living with a full heart and sharing what we have to offer from that place is part of our protest. The choice to show up and move from generosity instead of greed is part of our protest. The connection to what ignites meaning, way beyond metrics or recognition, is part of our protest. Weaving work and relationships and lives that echo our values is part of our protest. Staying close to the pulse of aliveness is part of our protest.
There are the big things, the sweeping changes, the necessary systemic shifts that will take generations. Yes. And also, there are the day to day, moment to moment choices we make, the vulnerability of loving when contempt might feel safer, the tending of community, the orientation toward understanding when assuming might take less energy, the ever-evolving practice of staying present to it all. When the big things feel like too much, I remember I can turn toward so many other forms of protest in my heart, my home, my life. I remember these matter, too.
This is part of our protest.
This devotion to loving kindness, to fostering spaces of presence and care, to providing the kind of nourishment we want to see in the world, starting in ourselves first and slowly rippling outward, spreading like a wing, like the whole sky.
This is part of our protest.
This bearing witness to the humanity each of us is carrying inside, sometimes invisibly, sometimes in ways no one would ever guess by just looking, sometimes in ways we’d never realize without the potent power of curiosity.
This is part of our protest.
This willingness to confront our own hurts, our own soft spots, our own growing edges, our own harshness, our own addictions, our own failings, our own unconscious embodiment of what we say we’re against, our own not-so-binary selves… and tending to it all with love anyway.
This is part of our protest.
This going outside and letting the sun warm your face first thing in the morning, feeling what shifts inside as a result of the earth’s nourishment.
This is part of our protest.
This choice to try again and return to the heart, over and over, the forgetting being an endless part of the remembrance, the remembrance being a bolster when we forget again, and again, and again.
This is part of our protest.
This attunement to the realities of the world, this willingness to keep looking at it all: to watch the bombs and the blooms, the hoarding and the help, the division and the dreaming, the greed and the growing, the whole of what this earth holds.
This is part of our protest.
This humble admitting of all we don’t know, of all we still have to learn, of all we haven’t yet understood or internalized or figured out, letting it all fuel the gift of a Beginner’s Mind instead of fueling shame.
This is part of our protest.
This art-making. This poem-writing. This painting, this collage, this playlist, this quilt, this photograph, this garden, this beautiful meal, this expression of life unfurling from inside, turning into something to behold, maybe even share as a mirror of our common humanity.
This is part of our protest. This is part of our protest. This is part of our protest.
May we let our protests be tiny and mighty and everything in between.
May we return to what matters most when the chaos of the world burns too bright.
May we let this returning guide us toward right action, toward loving more.
May we open our eyes to all the ways we’re already being the change we want to see.
May we let ourselves be steadied by others when our wobbliness becomes dizzying.
May we find ways to let the lava out, let the anger pour, let the grief spill over.
May we be filled with the warmth of the sun, of a good meal, of someone’s love.
May we tend to the roots that are growing us into something more true.
May we trust the work of our hearts to be part of the building of something more beautiful, more whole, more free.
Thank you, as always, for being here.
△ Neuroception and Authoritarianism
△ “Dream a dream so big, only love can get you there.”
△ Quaking to Life — the gift of her words, always
△ My dearest friend’s Mother and the Mic gathering next month
△ This simple, herby, nourishing soup we made last night
△ The gift of a life lived in Northern California
With care,
Lisa
“…how did we stray so far from what matters?” This is the question that haunts me. This is the question I’m trying to find answers to. This is the question that I’ve been releasing over and over again to remind myself that it is not my sole responsibility to “fix”. And this is the question that I return to in guiding me back to what my soul knows matters. Knowing there are others who are doing the same is a boost of communal courage. Let it be so, Lisa. Let it be so.
Wow…and thank you, Lisa. I have been wrestling angels and demons the past couple of months. I needed to hear these truth reminders. I will water them and give them sunlight and let them breathe oxygen into my weary, fearing soul.