practicing audacious hopefulness

hopefulness in the age of mass despair is hard work, requires great diligence, and is utterly, undeniably worth it.

“always enshrouded by barriers of doing” - Avatamsaka Sutra (pen and ink hand by bad french)

There is an ER doctor who wears baseball caps embroidered with birds — one for each season of the year. Winter is a chickadee because they stick around, he told us. My joy in that moment elevated me, I think elevated the whole frightened room. I told him as much.

Technically I’m not supposed to wear them here… this was Friday in Oklahoma. Under threat of dangerous cold, smoldering grass fires, and the growing echoes of political violence, the hopefulness of birds took precedent over wardrobe policy.

Thank goodness.

Yesterday, I sat in meditation quite a bit, and mostly my body shook. I’ve read this is normal, perhaps the effect of trauma and trapped energy finally leaving my body. There will likely be more shaking to come. My job is simply to allow it, along with anything else that shows up. So each day I am doing my best to surrender to being exactly where, who, and how I am, and it is good and difficult work.

I like to imagine — in fact, I believe — that if I can manage to weather this shaking; if I can allow the trapped energy of this lifetime to move through me; if I can open and surrender completely, then perhaps also in this lifetime I can help to release some of the trapped energy of our communal traumas. If this is even a remote possibility, and I’m unabashedly certain that it is, I must pursue it.

I woke around 4 this morning to someone, and no one, very clearly saying my name, Bailey.

I’m still not sure how to answer, but I do know this:

The chickadee sticks around, and the great bells of our bodies sing harmoniously together if we let them.

Amen.

Svaha.

Hallelujah.

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I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.