Dear friends,
I almost just tried to talk myself out of writing this letter that urgently wants to come out of me. Parts of me say “what is the point”, “you are adding to the noise”, “what good is going to come from it". With gratitude I am shutting these parts off right now, because quiet frankly, I want to add to the noise, or rather the eery quiet that has taken over on my social media when it comes to Gaza.
Everything I am writing on MILK comes from the heart and so does this piece. If this feels uncomfortable for you, if maybe even the title of this letter made you want to not open this, I ask you kindly to stay and sit with it for a moment.
I am a mother.
Lately, when I look into my sons eyes, I see the sad eyes of suffering children look back at me. Lately, when my daughter complains about her dinner options all I can think about is the starving children of Gaza. The malnourished mothers. The tired fathers.
If I leave all rationalizations and let my shields fall, the ones that keep me safe and protected, all that remains is hurt.
The pain, of what “mother” means in Gaza right now is hard for me to comprehend, it is so big. It is so big, it edges up against the walls of my heart and makes me feel as if it is about to actually burst.
It is deeply uncomfortable to think about Gaza. Here in my cushioned life, I really can’t be bothered feeling deeply uncomfortable for a longer period of time. Here in the West I have a lot of self-help advice about how I can’t be of service if I am not taking care of my own mental health first. Yes of course, I value my mental health, but I am under the impression that we have developed a lot of language and psychologized tools to feed o blissful ignorance. However, let’s not fool ourselves - we are but one earth.
Sometimes it is necessary to feel the collective hurt deeply, painfully and to learn how to sit in the duality of life.
Weltschmerz.
To live out both our privileged everyday AND the suffering of others. To not look away, but to feel into it, to pray into it, to heal into it and then to move out and live our life and then, when it rises up again in us, to feel into it again, to speak about it, to write about it, to scream about it. To let it rise up. To let it out of the body. To conceive it, to carry it, to birth it. A cyclical feeling into the collective hurt.
This is a letter from the heart to your heart, but of course it is political by nature. This is about the more than 25000 killed, the infrastructure destroyed, the 2 million that live in unfathomable despair without the necessary medical care, water and food. This is about a government that still calls this “defense”, even though the whole weight of its military power is used against a largely civilian population. This is about taking a look into the Westbank and notice the push of the settlements. This is not about underestimating the danger of a terrorist group like the Hamas, but to hold that and to vehemently call out the wrongdoing of the radical Israeli government. To see the deep asymmetry of the situation. This is about condemning what is happening, for the same reason I step in when my children start hurting each other. Simply, because I don’t see how this large scale violence could ever lead to a world more peaceful, more security.
This is not about having definitive answers how to move us forward, but to be vulnerable in my lamenting.
As long as
I have eyes that see
and
a heart that feels
C E A S E F I R E
now.
Everything is connected. We are all connected. I do not believe that the pain on the other side of the world, will go unnoticed in my cells, in the mycelium of our human experience and in the energetic field that binds us all together.
In wild hope,