Small Things
Drop of water on lotus leaf
Skies by the sea are grey; and the fog has disappeared. The temperature is 65 degrees fahrenheit. Today is Sunday.
We are moving through a time of disruption, unlike anything seen in this country since the move to incarcerate 126,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The unspoken panic of government, in the past was belied by the lack of preparation for the political choice to activate such drastic measures across the continent. Families were put in horse stables, desert locations far from society, and captured behind make-shift fences of barbed wire, and forced to use toilets that were hastily constructed without walls so paper bags had to be used to provide "privacy". Hawai'i was somewhat spared the trauma for obvious reasons, but the secondary trauma over family loss and psychic injury was there for many.
Today, there are stories that clearly signal a direction that is putting everyone who is not a person of wealth or privilege, on notice: you are not safe, you are not wanted, you are not part of the future.
It is a big deal when futures are taken away, en masse. The present is our past and future so removal in the present has huge implications. What is still available to ground and affirm those who are being erased in this moment? Where are the places in which the fact of existence matter and will endure? How are we to navigate these waters when we know what is happening now – never mind 7 generations into the future?
The answer is obvious.
It is in what we often call the "small things" that cannot be erased by politics, or incarceration, or disappearance from the streets. Those small things include our relationships to each other, our ability to look up and see what the heavens are saying, our access to the real human emotions (not the ones that AI are asking us to accept as real) that come from events and occurrences that happen as long as we are still alive.
We know that this is true because we have seen it before. There is a long history of so-called leaders seeking to make life better through politics, having setbacks in that arena due to the deep commitment to the duality that is "us and them", leading to the inevitable end: conflict and paralysis and sometimes, death.
In the meantime, the people find a way. That way is decentralized, it is ubiquitous, it is in the small things of daily living wherever a community exists. It includes seeing the needs, considering what one an do each day, each moment, and it is in refusing to stop seeing the beauty, the hope, and the hardships all as one - not choosing to enter another duality, understanding this is a moment and not forever. No body politic can capture forever.
We continue to do what has to be done in our daily lives and we share what we can out of a place of generosity and being awake to the reality that human beings have the quality of understanding – different from "knowing".
It is in our humanity that we can live through the times that create the kind of fear, anxiety, and stifling paralysis that comes from wrong thought, wrong words, wrong action, wrong awareness, no compassion.