I know. No posts for weeks, and then two posts in two days.
Yesterday, I wrote in my gratitude list about how difficult January is. I should clarify that it’s not entirely spent in a burrito on the couch scrolling through my phone. There is definitely more of that than I wish for myself, but there are also small bursts of energy in the Tunnel of Tired, usually in the context of those strategies I listed. January is definitely not all bad. It’s just a slog.
But now to the point of the post. Here are two items from my journal in the past year:
Usually my wishes and heart’s desires, when I write or speak them with intention, are fairly internal or safe things that I can be pretty sure that I can help create. Wishing to return to Tanzania in such an intentional way (it’s been my constant internal wish/heart’s desire since my last trip 36 years ago) has always felt risky because I didn’t want to deal with the disappointment of not having my wish granted. It was okay as long as it was basically unstated, or stated wistfully, and I knew that it was just a “wish.” Then the disappointment of it not happening would be less intense. But here I was, saying it out loud. Putting it out there. And the novena concluded, and the year began to wane, and I let myself forget my magically spoken wish. Making a trip to Tanzania hasn’t been something I could logistically or financially plan, hard as I looked at it, so I figured that it just still wasn’t time, or that it was unlikely ever to happen.
But last November, my brother and sister-in-law asked me if I might want to accompany them on a trip to Tanzania. They’d made the plans already. I’m getting some help in the financial area. Our tickets are bought. Shots in order. Willing and capable substitute procured for the classroom. In just three weeks, we’re making a dream trip back to the place where we spent our early childhood. My heart’s desire.
I’d forgotten that I had made these clear intentions in written form, and was looking through my journal a couple days ago when I stumbled across them. Feels like a miracle. At the very least, it’s a sparkling synchronicity.
I worded the heart’s desire as a “sacred journey.” This is a good reminder that I don’t go entirely as a tourist or as a home-goer (both of which have problematic edges, and which have been part of my uncertainty about returning), but as a vessel, to receive what is meant for me to receive, to give what is meant for me to give. To find the strands that are woven into this web. To keep my heart open, to allow the jittery excitement to give way to a quiet sense of purpose and intention, receptivity. To delight in everyone and everything.
Gratitude List:
1. Three-day weekend. Breathe in. Breathe out.
2. Anticipating seeing actual flamingos in a few weeks
3. Generosity, how it grows and expands as it is given
4. How the big birds–the hawks and vultures and eagles and crows–catch the wind and whirl above the ridge
5. Puzzles
May we walk in Beauty!
“I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.” —Audre Lorde
“Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it” —Maya Angelou
“If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.” —Maya Angelou
“History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion.” —Joe Biden
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” —Robert Frost
“I am always doing what I cannot do yet
in order to learn how to do it.” —Vincent van Gogh
“Have you been to jail for justice? Then you’re a friend of mine.” —Anne Feeney
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” —Naomi Shulman
“The desire to reach the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise and most possible.” —Maya Angelou
“Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life.” —Louise Erdrich
“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
Re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book;
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman
“In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.
“The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.” —Adrienne Rich
“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever.”—James Baldwin, in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”
Mockingbird Chronicles 