Both Malachy McCourt and Carrie Fisher are credited with saying that
resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. How
can we continue to engage without sacrificing our happiness to no good end or
giving into despair? By weaving connection. By keeping hope alive, as Shepard
Fairey, who designed Obama’s iconic 2008 poster, has done by creating a new series of images for the dark time that began today.
By defending one another’s rights and one another’s dignity. By creating local
strategies for progressive change, and for resistance.
And by recognizing that when we’ve chewed through everything
in sight, till our skins are taut to bursting, we may need to reach a moment of
acknowledgement that more of the same will lead to nothing other than exhaustion. We may need the faith of the caterpillar that
inside the cocoon, something will happen beyond anything we can ask or imagine.
The cocoon itself is the faith of the caterpillar.
This is not a cute image of easy change. If you get curious from
the outside about what’s going on in the cocoon, you can only wreak destruction.
Open it up, and you’ll find nothing but an organic soup: the caterpillar doesn’t
gradually transform into a butterly. It dissolves in an act of self-digestion.
This is no time to retreat into our own private cocoons. We
need now both to go into the cocoon together and to become the cocoon for one
another. We need to embrace the notion that for life to go on, we have to
surrender our attachment to the strategies that have failed us, or at least run
their course, but say yes to one another, from day to day and week to week. We need the faith that was shown by the Occupy
Movement. We need the faith of the Freedom Riders. We need the faith of Martin
Luther King. We need the faith of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s and of
the Stonewall Rebellion. We need the faith that a day will come when it’s time
to emerge.
Encouraging and touching. And like you, I created a news blackout yesterday.
ReplyDelete