There are those days when I am absolutely sure that I can change the world for the better and then, there are those days when I wonder how I can be so absurdly naive to think that anything that I do matters to anyone.
Today, unfortunately, is one of the latter. I’ve been sending sales emails for 10 hours now. They are mundane follow ups, exactly the kind that I never, ever have time for and precisely the kind that every one in fifty turn into a sale, and that sale is what keeps us afloat, or should I say, its what pays the three members of my team that I absolutely must pay to keep us afloat.
I’m tired and I’m tired of being tired. I know that tomorrow is another day and likely I will wake up renewed and once again believing that it is just this one more thing that will flip the switch, trigger the landslide and spark the revolution. I know that tomorrow I might feel hope again but today it just feels like I’ve said that, believed that, bought my own story of fabricated potential greatness too many times.
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And today is a new day. The air is crisp and bright outside and I am sitting in the window seat of my sister’s house looking out on the burgundy red leaves of the beautiful aspen, the concrete in her driveway barely visible under the cover of fall. I woke up early, eager to start things right, take a walk, settle myself and start again. Today is Sunday, my sister and her family are getting ready for church and I am waiting patiently for a moment of quiet but in the meantime entertaining her pre-teen munchkins and doing the things good aunts do which is basically a tightrope walk between being present, showering compliments and pretending not to care too much. Build ’em up, poke some fun to keep them guessing and off we go again. Today, Stella was dancing around singing xmas songs, her voice precisely calibrated to grate on every living nerve and Sydney was testing her own qualities of snotty teenage quips… ahh the fun. My sister interrupted the fray to hand me the Liturgies for Hope book and suggested in her tongue-in-cheek way that precedes all little sisters telling their big sisters what to do, “Colie, i think you should read these liturgies. They will help you.” – oh great, I rolled my eyes, help me with what? My poor family is sure that I need help, so much help that it’s hard to determine what should come first… should I find god, or find a boyfriend? On this trip everyone has concluded that the boyfriend is of critical need and have aligned their efforts behind the guy that does yoga with my sister and “seems like he’s single.” Of course with pre-teen girls and a very married sister, the voyeurism towards imagined fairytale love satisfies whole afternoons of creativity and stalking. This poor, poor unsuspecting man has no idea how many times his name has been whispered, screeched and accompanied by a kissy face around here. I entertain the thought because it keeps things fun, but I’m pretty jaded on dating, not because I have been doing much of it but maybe more precisely because I haven’t. I’d certainly go on a date with yoga guy if he happened to be interested but sadly, my own reasons aren’t terribly compelling or likely to end in blissful romantic interludes… I’d just like someone to pay for my dinner and engage me in a conversation that is wholly different from my life. That’s all the expectations I have and enough. We did go to yoga and he was positioned right in front of me, even has a nice body and most of his hair. Seems great enough, date ready, although we still have no idea if he is single. He did have orange shorts on which I might have thought was a poor choice but then when we wandered into the parking lot after class, I discovered that there might be a few greater concerns. We watched with worry as he got into his jeep, seemingly oblivious to the tall man dressed in a black cloak and holding onto the roll bar. A few steps further and the dark cloaked man was discovered to be some sort of ghoulish figure carrying a blood soaked instrument. Ahh, it’s almost halloween…my concerns about him evolved into hoping that he is just particularly into his holidays. As my sister and I raised eyebrows getting into her truck, she laughed and said, “Remember Colie, my husband was driving a mint green Cadillac when I met him, things can change.” “Will you still go out with him?” The pre-teens asked upon hearing the report after yoga class. “Yes,” I said. I would absolutely love to learn the origins of ghoul guy, I’ll even pay for dinner.
Back to the liturgies. I flipped open the book and started reading. The first 3 sentences have way too many references to god or jesus or in this case martha, I’m not even sure who that is but apparently I should know. I hadn’t made it past paragraph one when my niece broke in, “Colie, you haven’t read that fast, you aren’t already there!” – she was referring to the middle of the book where I held it open. “Of course not I said, this isn’t a regular book, you are just supposed to flip it open and it will land on what you need.” She rolled her eyes and I demonstrated with a flourish as though this was Merlin’s book of magic. I swirled it above my head, tapped the cover twice and voila! “Liturgies for those who haven’t belly laughed recently.” It got a fast and furious belly laugh from all of us.
It has been a long time since I’ve laughed at all, really. It is so hard to be in the world these days. I was on a call this same morning for work and in that 15 minute interlude I received two whatsapp messages – one that a young girl from my community had passed away from leukemia and then another, from the sister of a colleague that I had been texting with yesterday. “Nicole, this is Katia, Monica’s sister. After talking to you she had an accident and broke both her hands, please reach out to Mathew to schedule the meeting.” Whew, life strikes hard and these are just the simple things, the ones that are not good, but normal in their own way. But what about those other things, the ones that make me scared to click on the news feed in my email, or open my social media, or open, well look up or outside of my bubble anywhere. Never justified wars in the world and multitudes of deaths in gaza, in israel, in russia, ukraine, lebanon, morocco, libya and dozens more places that don’t make the news. I am struck by the quality of living, or the practice of surviving that requires one to somehow see this, know this and then go on and about our daily life. Mothers are losing their babies and being held hostage in proxy wars without meaning and somehow we should all look, but fail to feel and look away. Isn’t this an impossible ask? And yet, we do it, I do it. These days it is feeling harder to know where to look away too. As I was ending my call this morning my colleague made reference to wanting to live lost in the mountains, “just bake bread and grow vegetables,” she said and I felt again, what I felt last night. How can anything I do make a difference, even a dent or a drop in the infinity of despair that we have in this world?
My work, the work that fills me up, that I’m passionate about, that I believe could somehow contribute to a movement towards something better. This work which is as simple as a few tools and thinking practices, this work that lit a fire in my vision for how I could contribute in a greater way to the world. This work, which involves helping educators to reconnect to the purpose for why they became educators in the first place and then gives them tools to activate their purpose in their practice of teaching. I see the fire in the eyes of those teachers when they walk out of our courses, I watch them participate actively in every moment of our workshops, I see the steam in their brains as they are challenged to think differently, think deeper and then those moments, the light bulb moments that happen when it clicks, when they innovate to improve student wellbeing, or they find that key leverage point to rally their coworkers to support their own passion for sustainability. This work. If only every one of us could have this work. It’s not perfect, it’s not everything, in fact it will do nothing to stop babies being killed. I know this. I also know that there is no safe spot on the slide towards despair, it might be uphill towards something better but turning towards the light, whatever sliver of it exists is the only way to live. We grow towards the light, we find life in the precious gift of the sun as it warms our planet and our skin and draws our gaze upward.
The afternoon sun filters through the leaves of the trees just outside my window, the wind is consistent, comforting and full of peace. My brother in law comes home, hooks the trash trailer to his truck and is off again on a visit to the dump. The man across the street is loading up the back of his own truck, seems like camping gear, he makes sure it is tied down tight and I watch him check it and check again. There is an American flag blowing in the wind in front of my window. I see another on the flagpole at the neighbors house, the camper. My brother in law is retired military, his grown son, also military. I too was raised to love my country, to see the flag as sacred. I understand why we do this, how it grounds us, gives us safety, creates identity with those others “like us.” But, I have lived outside the U.S. for so long and been forced to build my community with others like me for so long that I no longer can be held by the illusion that my country is as simple as a flag and a few proud values might suggest. I cannot remain blind to the role of my country in this carnage. We cannot continue to decimate people and call it an act of protecting freedom. I want to love that flag in the way that I was raised to, but how can I love something that has lost itself in the gluttony of having too much, too easily and on the backs and the blood of too many? My own country bans books, denies people their rights to love who they love, claims to value families but then undermines their capacity to care for them. My own country, one of the wealthiest in the world, has children without food, schools without resources and the number one cause of death is guns too.
Our children are suffering with depression and anxiety, they ask, “why is school relevant, what does it have to do with the world?” My own two kids asked me this question and I said,”I don’t know, but just do it anyways, it’s how the system works.” I said this because I had no other answer. How has school become so irrelevant, how does the system which purports to prepare our children for their future, fail them so spectacularly? I used to feel powerless but today, on the good days, I do see a way that we can bring our schools back around to purpose. I know that the work that I do won’t feed people, halt climate disasters or save children from gun violence – but it will help us to find how it is they that can do these things that they dream to do – they, our dedicated educators and our precious children who can choose to use their gifted lives towards something, towards outcomes that are as big as the circles in which they move and the ripples that extend into the communities where they live. “There is no greater voice than the voice of our children,” I say this to our educators as I remind them of their opportunity and influence.
My sister homeschools her two girls because she is afraid that our public schools will strip them of their christian values and because she wants to keep her babies close for as long as she can. I can’t speak to christian values because i am afraid that they too are often warped for purposes not of which they were born but I can speak to the need to hold our children close, to protect them from all that is out there, to somehow stave off the pain, step towards the light. We do these things in the name of love and the practice of survival, but when and who calculates the cost of this survival? The suggestion of survival suggests that others aren’t so lucky. Do we turn our heads away from the pain because we cannot be dragged into the mess of the unlucky ones, or do we do so because recognizing their pain, acknowledging their humanity makes it impossible and immoral to justify our privilege?
In an act of my own irony I open the liturgies book again to see what answers it brings, “Liturgies for those kept awake in the night” I laugh again, sounds about right.