Friends. It has been quite a year.
There is this thing you can do with the tarot that will give you your “card of the year”. It’s a mathematical calculation so you go through cycles in your life. This year for me was “the hermit”. The last time I was cycling through the hermit I quite literally was living in a rustic cabin in Northern Vermont with no indoor plumbing. I didn’t know how this year could compare to such a literal manifestation, but I was ready to find out.
Feeling overwhelmed with the pace of my new life of full-time worker, parent of two kids under 5 and general northeasterner living, I set an intention on the last new moon of February to slow down.
Grinding halt was more like it.
The first few months of the pandemic and its effects gave me back so much time and space that I was feeling guilty to not be affected in a negative way as so many seemed to be. I embraced with gratitude being able to spend more time in the garden, more time with my family, more time for myself, my guides and my ancestors.
Then came May.
George Floyd was killed in another heartbreaking, enraging example of the prevalence of white supremacy. I’ve never known how to respond externally, how to use my grief and rage to bring about change. I’ve generally used my voice to raise awareness and point to one or two things that can be done. I’ve been to protests, written letters, called my elected officials. All of this can seem irrelevant in the presence of such horrors, but that’s what I do. That’s what I did on May 25th.
But this time was different. As a “white” person I felt swept up in the big “othering” of white people. Sharing resources and information turned into “virtue signaling” (when someone posts something just to make it look like they’re a “good” person). It was the same kind of sentiment as the posts that said you can’t call yourself an “ally”. I didn’t even know that I was trying to be an ally the first time I read that I couldn’t be one. I just thought I was trying to do the right thing. I didn’t know I was trying to show people I was a good person, I just thought I was trying to show people something they could do in a climate filled with despair.
I felt triggered. I felt alarmed. I wanted to flee. On June 28th, I fled.
I didn’t even know I was fleeing until months later. I thought I was taking a very needed break from the toxicity of social media. I still believe that taking that step away was necessary to get me where I am now, but I had no idea why I was feeling the way I felt.
The truth is that I have been enraged at injustice since before I can remember. I’ve also internalized the inadequacies of solutions for longer than I can remember, always feeling that because nothing I can do alone is enough, that I, myself, am not enough.
A therapist I saw in my twenties said that I was a “lightening rod for human suffering”. She offered a path to find out why I took everything home at the end of the day, and I never went back because she obviously didn’t understand, how can you NOT take all of that home at the end of the day. In a way I was right, but in a way she was also right.
I was holding all of that suffering, but not allowing any space for myself, for my joy.
When the Black women I followed on Instagram posted pictures celebrating Black joy and then some of them chastised white people for posting their own joy, saying it was “too soon”, everything inside that said you are not enough and don’t deserve love and joy came boiling up.
This is not white fragility.
This is humanity.
White people are broken. We live in a disconnected world where we were distanced from our traditions, lore and culture by the very nature of becoming “white”, centuries ago. Being raised and socialized white does as much harm to the white body as it does to any other body, but it does it inside, where it festers and manifests in the continuation of this cycle. A disease, both spiritual and sometimes manifesting as physical.
We come from families where we don’t soundly know we are loved unconditionally, because more important than being loved is being white. Wearing the “right” thing, saying the “right” thing, doing the “right” thing. But none of those “rights” are authentically “right”. What we should say is, wearing the “white” thing, saying the “white” thing , doing the “white” thing. All of our societal standards are the standards of whiteness. It has nothing to do with right because there is no duality of right.
There is no right and wrong.
There is a spectrum of choices and outcomes, and mistakes along the way. Whiteness doesn’t allow for mistakes and that’s the main problem. We get defensive and we stop listening. We contend that the horrors of hundreds of years ago are not ours to account for, that that thing we said was just taken the wrong way and our intention is important than the outcome, that we would never do what the “other” does.
We are the other. We are all the other. The other is us.
The truth is, I’ve never been an ally, or an accomplice or “woke”. I’ve just been trying to listen to the voice inside that knows what I should do. Sometimes I can’t hear that voice over the din of righteousness. Sometimes I get it wrong. I’m human. I’m so grateful to be on this beautiful planet, with the gifts of space, time and otherness. To watch a seed sprout, then grow, then sometimes get eaten by a rabbit, but sometimes grow into a seven foot towering body of life. To see myself in the other. To be seen.
Now is the time for forgiveness, and now is the time for accountability. Now is the time for grief. Now is the time for joy. Now is the time to make the choices that the quiet voice has been whispering this whole time.
Now is the time to listen.
Now.
For all of us.