I think you are very brave to speak your truth so completely. Yes, our first care must always be for ourselves. And then, as we feel able, to care for others. This has more wisdom than all other theology. I also think it’s very true that we are activists in a wide variation of ways. To sit in prayer, to march, to organize, to speak truth, to write, to challenge the tide of hate in any way we can- is all activism and no one form of it counts for more than another form. No one does it all and everyone has to choose what they are able to do. And the more careful your choice at the beginning, chances are the longer and more you’ll be able to do as time goes on. If we don’t choose well at the start, we may court despair and fatigue soon into large work. All spiritual work needs our best, not our most.
I would also like to say, while I’ve go the soapbox so firmly in my open mouth, that I’ve been talking with a number of therapists and it seems that many many people are becoming overwhelmed with fear and discouraged that the world and the human race are in such increasing trouble. At times such as this, I would like to remind Friends that there are disciplines to keep before us so that the noise of the world does not arrest our connection to the Divine. We wouldn’t want to lose our wisdom or our spiritual guidance for lack of regular quiet and careful listening. Please know those things that bring you back to the calm center and work them into regular disciplines. This might be increased contact with beloveds, physical work or movement, keeping quiet time saved each day, taking more time to tell the ones we trust exactly how we feel, and limiting our intake of sensationalized news- since the radio doesn’t have pictures, it can be more gentle on the brain.
And one more idea- whether the pain of your life was witnessed in a war zone or in a family, when so much hatred is becoming public discourse the effects on our internal processes are the same. If fear or rage or fatigue is growing stronger within you, it may be time to attend to what you know about the pain of your life and take some steps toward self-care just as we would when events more directly involve us then the current crisis. I mean if you were robbed it could easily carry the reverberations of earlier worse trespasses and so we might get some help with that reverberation. All the noise of the world has gotten so much worse now, that we each might find ways of keeping our balance amidst such invasive trouble.
I have been thinking about the condition of having an enemy. I think like most trouble it calls us to learning. How is this constructed? What is my part in the construction? How am I understood by others? And what do I know about the opposition? One short idea is to offer the names of 4 films, all 4 about children in Islamic Arabic nations. I have found them to be informative and touching. Children of Heaven is about the relationship of a young brother and sister where the brother helps his sister to get new shoes. Color of Paradise is the story of a young blind boy and his father. A Time for Drunken Horses is about a young boy trying to keep his siblings together after a parent dies. The White Balloon is about a young girl and her brother in a busy city. If I remember right, all 3 videos are in Farsi with subtitles. The story telling is simple and the feelings are universal.
I feel these films also serve to inform me about the wealth we surround ourselves with unknowingly and how this might appear to those struggling for scrap paper and pencil simply to learn how to write. My own international travel has been meager and only for work so I learn from others witness. But I think we are called at this time to understand why this hate comes to us now, killing so many and how we can be targets of people we don’t even think about. How do enemies get made? How can we learn and understand enough to lessen the condition that makes hate possible.
How is it that some days just become tender as the messages come from here and there with this one having surgery and that one broken hearted and this one with some old loneliness and another with no mercy for herself? And maybe partly I had a dream upon waking that puts me in the frame of mind where many things of the now remind of sometime ago when the world was different and I was different and there’s a tenderness to remembering even briefly. Just before school let out when I was in early grade school, I might catch a glimpse of old Mr. Roberts heading off into the woods with his ox cart to gather firewood, his two red-brown ox slow and powerful old friends of his who never needed the whip he carried. He drove horse teams for my grandfather when my family first came to the little Yankee town and were the darkest people ever to stay. My grandmother sitting by the pond shelling peas says quietly, “yes, I saw Buffalo Bill Cody when his Wild West Show came to town soon after I came off the boat from Italy. His hair was long and white and beautiful.”