By Anna Blaedel
A few weeks ago, with my two younger niblings, I was trying to describe daily life before cell phones, Siri, Google, Alexa. I told them about entire albums, listened to as an event, and about card catalogs and encyclopedia sets, and having to wait, and wonder, when we do not know.
They wanted to know how I talked with my friends, how I even could find my friends, in a world without texting, location sharing, pin drops and dots that glow green or red. So much has changed, so quickly, about how we find each other, and how we find our way. In so many ways, we seem to be losing our way, finding each other less and less while increasingly oversaturated by exponentially proliferating forms and means of “connection.”
I thought about how, in college, my friends and I would find each other, by learning each other’s rhythms and lives. I was usually at that one coffeeshop, with a stack of books. One friend, usually with his guitar, could be found on one particular stoop. Another, often, at the piano in that one dorm lounge. In the late afternoons, a particular group of benches was a congregating spot. A grove of trees by the river was another. We’d look for each other until we found each other, or until we found something or someone else to share our time, and attention.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we find each other, now, in this time of converging crises and cascading catastrophes. So much is unraveling, so quickly. So much is coming undone. So much is being revealed. So much is being lost, and so much is at stake, and so much is yet possible. In a time of apocalypse–which is to say, a time of transition, of transformation, of unveiling, of invitation–how do we find our people? How do we find our way?
Sendolo Diaminah talks about our time as a time of empires, ending. How empires end, he reminds, matters. How the undoing happens matters. We have an unprecedented opportunity, he says, to steer and shape the end of empire. There is so much to be afraid of. There is so much pain and devastation. It’s not all sweetness and beauty and “live laugh love” and “love and light.” But. And. Sendolo speaks of the unshakable confidence that emerges when we are able, yet, to cultivate connection and encounter beauty and treat each other well, in the midst of All This.
Mary Oliver writes, imagining the end of empire if we stay the course we’re on, “We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”
Sendolo reminds us it can yet be otherwise. To find each other, these days, we need hearts that are big, and discerning, and full of tenderness. To cultivate such tenderheartedness, Andrea Gibson describes a practice of love that joyfully replaces thoughts of “me” with “we.” Gibson writes, “The We I speak of here stretches beyond humanity to the tadpoles in the creek, to the rowdy rainstorm that flooded my basement, to the mourning dove perched on the Honey Maple tree watching me learn Qigong (awkwardly), to the ladybug who I suspect is a boyish ladybug like me, walking the tightrope of my lifelines while I carry her outside to sunbathe atop a kind and sturdy rock.”
I spent a morning meditating on that We Gibson describes, and that night had a dream, only some of which I remembered upon waking. A refrain from the dream has stayed with me: when we find our people, we find our way.
Every Friday afternoon, for almost a year now, a group has gathered on a particular local corner, protesting the US-enabled Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the genocide being waged against the people of Gaza. The size of the group has swollen and shrunk; we have huddled together through the winter cold, and sweated together through the summer heat. We have chanted, sung, and marched. We have laughed together, wept together, prayed together, dreamed together. On Friday afternoon, I know where I can find Ed, likely in his 70s, the longtime local organizer for Veterans for Peace, with whom I stood, side by side, protesting the US invasion of Iraq over twenty years ago now. On Friday afternoon, I know where I can find Osama, the Palestinian-American I didn’t know a year ago, and now cannot imagine being in life and community, without. On Friday afternoon, I know where I can find a deepening, broadening We, of trans activists and peace activists and Palestinians and Arab-Americans and Jews, trying to find, to make, to make possible, another way. I can be found there because it saves my life, it saves my soul, it saves my spirit, getting to be part of that We.
How are you finding your people?
How are you finding your way?
How are we finding each other?
How can we find a way so that they will not be able to say that our hearts, in these days, were small, and hard, and full of meanness?
How will we be known, by how we are coming undone?
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.