By Anna Blaedel
Last night I dreamt of hurricane winds rushing through groves of olive trees. Though it did not storm where I live, so many storms are gathering, intensifying. In my dream, the sound was chaotic, loud, disorienting. Heartwood groaning under unrelenting, chaotic pressure. Ancient branches cracking like thunderclaps. The trees were crying, howling, moaning. A signal, a summons, a song. Within the tremendous intensity of the storm, a whisper: The trees know how to heal.
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of sitting in a sacred circle, part of a tender collective listening deeply into our lives to attune to the liberatory rhythms of wholeness, healing, and pleasure. What, and who, do you love most of all? What people, what values, what ideas, what experiences constitute the core, the throughline, the pulsing heart of all you hold precious, sacred, irreplaceable?
We were invited to imagine these things as our North Star. More than a destination, North Stars reveal possible ways. More than a map from point A to point B, they help us orient to the many ways we might make, and find, our way–through storms, in chaos, into healing.
There is raw power in knowing what, and who, you love, cherish.
There is raw power in tapping into what, and who, guides and orients your life.
There is raw power in confronting what, and who, guides and orients our collective life.
Last week was the autumn equinox. Darkness and light, rebalancing. Seasons, shifting. It is a season of shedding and seeding. Rupture and possibility.
Next week begins the month of Tishrei. Within Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah ushers in the holy days of the new year. It is a season of realigning. Toward sweetness, and accountability, and healing, and the raw and tender possibilities which emerge from reorienting, repatterning.
This last year has been a year of rupture, of pain. Of genocide, unfolding. Of storms, escalating. Of olive trees, crying out. Of watching elected leaders, including ones I voted for, sending billions of dollars of weapons of war to slaughter children, and elders, and mothers, and poets, and olive trees.
Prentiss Hemphill asks, “What will it take for us to heal?” This question, they suggest, reveals where we are headed and how we might get there.
We are witnessing the consequences of generations of occupation and displacement. Of violent disregard for precious, beloved life. Of collective life oriented toward the North Stars of profit, power, domination, and control. “What will it take for us to heal?”
Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective teach us that our spiritual and healing practices are necessary to our survival, and that our care for each other is–always, always–political.
Marcellus Khaliifah Williams should still be alive. His poem, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine,” should be read, by him, aloud, in schools full of books and not guns, in buildings that have not been bombed into dust.
“in the face of apex arrogance
and ethnic cleansing by any definition…
still your laughter can be heard”
Pain can consume us. Grief can suffocate breath. Unhealed trauma, ongoing rupture, endangers precious life. “What will it take for us to heal?”
In the days and weeks to come, as storms literal and metaphorical bear down, may you find shelter under trustworthy North Stars. May you practice aligning your life with what is precious, irreplaceable, and beloved. May we practice aligning collective life with what is precious, irreplaceable, and beloved. May we scream, and weep. May we hold, and be held. May we rage, and breathe, and sing. May our dreams bear sweetness, even when they are haunted and haunting. May, still, laughter be heard…
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.