There have been many times over the last several months when I’ve wanted to write. Writing is my release—the place I go when I am angry and sad and vulnerable and where I go when I don’t know what to do with all of that. Where I find connection with something deeper inside me; where the loud voices of the world become dim; where I exist simply as me.
Lately, the world has been shaken. And recently, I have been shaken in my own life. So much shaking –it is no wonder the words must come out of me now.
I picture a bottle of coke, one that has been shaken and tossed around, maybe rolled around in the backseat of some old car. When it opens there is no warning—only an eruption, like everything that has been tossed around is finally ready to release. It’s messy and goes in places you don’t want it to go. It fumes like a volcano, liquid running down the edges and gathering in puddles. The noise—an unforgettable spew of fizz and gas and air.
This is me, about to unleash.
It is August 2020, and in the eight months that have emerged from a dropping ball and fireworks and resolutions, I feel broken. The world has been riddled by a virulent pandemic that does not discriminate, but which has fueled the flames of division and fear. My country feels fragile, uncomfortable, foreign. Tension is palpable from the coast of California to the tops of the mountains that stand tall in the Carolinas. In all my effort to understand love, I am left feeling like something is amiss.
I try to understand other perspectives, other points of view. I try to let go of the biases that have colored the lens through which I view the world. But what I cannot understand is the ability to see another human as inferior, less-than, worth-less. And, I admit that I cannot say I have never treated someone else this way—for the flaws of humanity run deep in my veins, too. Along the way I probably felt more entitled, more worthy, more deserving. I am learning, too.
In graduate school I saw firsthand that beneath the color of our skin, we all look the same inside. The veins and arteries that lead to one heart follow a much similar path as the veins and arteries that lead to another. The nerves that course through the spinal cord and brain and find their way to muscles act the same way in one arm as they do in another. I imagine the energy that supports life is much the same from one individual to another.
So I guess I find it hard to imagine that someone can look at his fellow being and see them as inferior because of: the color of their skin, how they pray, their last name, who they choose to love, the language they speak, their gender, anything else that makes them “different.”
My friend sent me a meditation this morning that called on me to see myself as a flower blooming, and it made me think: if all humanity were red roses, we would miss out on all the other different kinds of flowers that stain meadows and climb up mountains, the flowers that float in rivers and whisper in the woods. If the sunset only held one color, can you imagine? The absence of gold and pink, streaks of lavender and crimson, the way I imagine God dips his fingers in cups of magenta and marigold and mauve, and then streaks them across the sky.
How much we would miss if everything was the same.
As I sit here watching the same sky as you fade to night, I hope you know you matter. I hope you know you are loved. I hope you know you are just as important as any other. And I hope you challenge yourself as I plan to do, to connect with someone you may normally dismiss as “different.” Find yourself in their eyes, in the stride of their walk, in the way their lips curl into a smile. Find yourself in the way they tilt their head in thought, the way their heart beats faster after a loud noise, the way they push their hair back behind their head. Find yourself in each other, because that is the only way to find what’s real.
And then go out and shake things up.