Note from Louisa

I’m not sure if you are feeling the same pull or opposition that I have been feeling over the last few weeks. There is a strange sense of expectation that I can’t quite identify. It might simply be the constantly shifting weather pulling us back and forth between winter and spring. It might be the continued roller coaster ride of the relentless news cycle and state of global affairs.
 
I find myself aware of a peculiar tension: a need to hold some sort of space for all the dying beliefs and structures in a country that is sometimes hard to recognize, along with something that feels suspiciously like hope. 
 
This moment feels important and pivotal as rules, predictability, and global stability are deconstructed. As it feels like we are moving backward rather than forward in efforts toward unity and inclusivity. As personal profit and self-promotion become the focus of our talents and endeavors. It feels almost like holding vigil. Like sitting by the bedside of a hospice patient, knowing that the time for effective treatment has passed and palliative measures are all that remain. Staying present with compassion and faith.
 
At the same time, I sense something new brewing, in the earliest stages of gestation. That time in the beginning of new life when you might not even share the news with anyone because it feels too fragile, and to breathe it aloud might somehow disrupt the process of creation.
 
There is both an ending and a beginning. So it has ever been.
 
I share my experience because I have noticed some newfound energy and optimism for the state of things. History has always been a teeter-toter, a balancing act, moving to and fro along that infamous moral arc. Yes, the values and expectations we have lived by are being slowly dissolved into… well, something else. But this is impermanence in action. It was never going to remain the same.
 
We must sit by the bedside of the fading world, offering it words of gratitude and comfort. And we must also prepare ourselves to midwife a new world into existence. She will be fragile and weak and will need our protection as she takes her first, tremulous steps.
 
If we falls too deeply into mourning, if we become too angry over what has been lost, if hold on too tightly to what we wanted the world to be, we will not have the strength, the stamina, or the focus to champion the new life that is to come.
 
“May you be rocked, as deeply as necessary and as gently as possible” ~Anonymous
Louisa