The Heart of the Collective
Sending love and solidarity to our L.A. family.
Hi, doll.
I’m writing this perhaps ill-advisedly, as I have a cold so virulent that I’m not able to talk, let alone gauge if my words are fully appropriate. But something small happened that might help someone besides myself, so I am sharing it here. This is about the fires, so if you are feeling overwhelm, please accept my love and read no further. If I overstep, please accept my apologies.
Last night I was lying on the floor of my Brooklyn apartment focusing on the final quadrant of a heart chakra mediation—compassion, which my teacher always defined as “suffering with.” Not objectifying nor fetishizing others’ suffering, not trying to solve it, not making it about yourself.
Just offering your heart so others are not alone in their struggles.
Not surprisingly, I found myself on the West Coast with my many SoCal friends and clients. I breathed love, I breathed strength, and suddenly the glass bodega candle burning beside me splintered and began to belch flames. Frozen, I watched as the fire climbed until it threatened to travel to the couch or scorch the ceiling.
I leapt off the floor to douse the flames with a jug of water, but they continued to climb so high that I screamed loudly enough to scare my permakitten. Then just as suddenly the fire extinguished, leaving a mess of black soot and broken glass in its wake.
Panting and soaked in sweat, I lay back down. My heart was racing; my stomach was in my throat. That single out-of-control candle had triggered all my trauma responses, and it was only a microcosm of the fires savaging everything in their SoCal paths.
The only other time a candle in my apartment had gotten remotely out of control was during a ritual to unbind a particularly trying relationship. This time, I knew the collective had fanned the candle’s flames.
Whether or not we admit it, the genetic material of all humans is so similar that everyone is a cousin. Our institutions fail us, so does a lot of our conditioning, but against all odds a matter-of-fact love endures; an impulse for compassionate service, too.
Environmentally and geopolitically (even astrologically), we have rapidly arrived at a new era in history. Though it may bring us somewhere more sustainable, it feels profoundly apocalyptic. For now all we’ve got is each other.
So to our Los Angeles cousins undergoing this trauma in real time, don’t worry about making heads or tails of anything right now. It probably doesn’t have to be said, but you don’t need to express gratitude or be hyper-logical or find a constructive perspective or even communicate unless it helps you.
You only have to survive so you can thrive again later.
When the flames die out, institutions may continue to fail you, but your cousins will help raise you from the ashes. Not because we are trying to fix you or make it about us. But because, no matter how despairing or dissociated you may feel, you are family and you are not alone.
The light is all of ours.
With waggling eyebrows and slow kitty blinks,
Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
And I hope that cold or whatever has gripped you resolves sooner not later.