yesterday: inauguration.
artists and poets and leaders boldly telling the truth of who we are as a growing-up nation. “unfinished”, in the words of poet Amanda Gorman.
in the truth-telling, clear dissonance emerged between our aspirations and reality.
and into this gap, they breathed possibility. they stirred life. and proclaimed the dream.
the power of proclaiming the dream!
moving and powered by LOVE.
LOVE knocks at our soul’s door and stays there, standing upright, fierce and patient. LOVE does not turn away. LOVE does not back down. LOVE sees the truth and tells it. and reminds us of the promise of more, daring to imagine.
so different from the easier love that makes nice, makes comfortable, tries to solve and fix and change.
love knocks at the door of our ego and hunches there, with fear-laced echoes of caution. it lingers and haunts by and through illusion, impossible to ever meet.
this love is seductive and dangerous, a wolf dressed in lamb’s clothing. it is impotent, incapable of compelling movement. it is quicksand, paralyzing. it slices and dices life into bits and pieces, sweeping them into piles of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, and in doing so prescribes life-threatening self-improvement treatments aimed at furthering separating those piles.
the power that drives this engine of deceit is not the power of LOVE but that of fear. so little. so small. so pitiful.
ahhhh, but the power of LOVE…
LOVE transforms because it begins with LOVE, rooted in LOVE.
LOVE don’t always feel good. seeing our whole selves ain’t easy. there are those bits and pieces that have been sliced and diced into piles of shame, blame, guilt. piles that make up stories we begin to believe about ourselves. piles that diminish the complexity of who we are.
when we gather up these piles and bring them together into wholeness, a new, truer story emerges. and from this place of Truth, from this place of LOVE-without-condition, everything shifts.
three simple words that perhaps best capture LOVE: “I see YOU.”
proclaiming the dream is not merely speaking of something out there in the far off distance–a plan that might be. proclaiming the dream is the naming of what is unfolding right here, right now. it is a weaving together of the threads of our history and those from our future…
in an interview this morning, Ms. Gorman–the poet who moved the world yesterday–shared her mantra: “I am the daughter of Black writers. We are descended from freedom fighters who broke through chains and changed the world. They call me.”
proclaiming the dream is the remembering of who we are while daring to imagine the possibility of who we might be.
Comentários