Ever since the election I’ve felt disembodied. It’s like my brain and my body are not in radio contact. Last week when I couldn’t find my keys, I finally found them on top of the yogurt in the refrigerator. After a contentious work meeting, I left a journal filled with confidential musings behind with no guarantee of who might read it before I could retrieve it. I’ve tripped on curbs so often my ankles might as well be silly putty.
And yesterday, as I was pumping gas into my car, I pulled the hose out mid-stream spraying me all over head to toe. I slipped in the resultant oil slick and it pulled my right boot’s sole partially off. Clonking around half-soled 15 minutes later, I showed up at a doctor’s appointment and had to apologize for my off-gassing which had, in a matter of seconds, overwhelmed the small office.
Where am I?? My body asks with heightened urgency. My brain’s doing its best to explain. It’s ok, you’re still in Seattle, cushioned (somewhat) from the palpable xenophobia seeping across most of the rest of the country. Yes, Donald Drumpf is our next President but we have enough checks and balances to maintain the freedoms embedded in our democracy. And yes, the Cascade Mountains are still stunning in the orange-pink alpenglow of a late fall afternoon. When all else fails, my brain reminds me, look to the timeless and be assured.
But my body is not sure of anything and the awkward fumbles and miscues speak to this uncertainty.
Just in the last few days, I discovered a trail of breadcrumbs to the feelings that override all rational thought marching through my logical brain. And the found feelings map directly to my grief.
When I say this, when I mention grief, people think I mean the grief associated with a Drumpf presidency. But that’s not it. Drumpf’s election simply located the well-cap covering the well-spring of nameless, gargantuan, unbounded grief associated with eons of missed opportunity, mine and the collective’s. The opportunity we’ve always had to connect to each other’s unique yet universal humanity but have not known quite how.
So just as Drumpf’s election located this well-cap of grief inside me, subsequent events have been trying to unscrew it from its rusty, hardened hinges.
Events like going to the Egyptian Theatre and watching Moonlight, a movie by writer and director Barry Jenkins about an African American boy in Miami having to grow up too fast. A movie about bearing witness to the tender, sensitive side of ‘the masculine’ meeting itself in the body of boy becoming a man attracted to other men. It’s achingly beautiful and deeply human. Through such beauty, the film commands you to sit with our human vulnerability and wonder about the opportunities we’ve missed to connect from that place.
Leaving the theatre, I notice the well-cap has been pried further lose. Wending my way through crowded sidewalks, I can almost smell the warm-blooded humanity of every person I pass, crossing Broadway, standing in front of Rancho Bravo, turning the corner towards home.
When an older man approaches asking for spare change, I stop before he can expel a word. As I go searching for my wallet, he dives into his knapsack to offer me one of several hats he had for a trade. I don’t think I would recognize him if we passed again on the street. But my memory of his kindness, inspiring my own, is firmly intact.
Our conversation is open and honest. He explains he’s found a safe place to sleep lately, away from the drugs and drinking. He shows me a new sleeping bag that is making his nights a lot cozier. He asks me where I grew up and how I like Seattle. I ask him about his family back in Arkansas and if he missed them. It is a lifetime of sharing in less than 5 minutes. Overwhelmed and undone, I feel the grief pushing me to my knees in gratitude for an opportunity to share this much connection with a stranger. Yet I hold onto my ocean of emotion, afraid of what kind of public spectacle open weeping would create. And then he is gone.
Who was this man? Hadn’t I known him all my life? He is family. He is friend. It felt like we’d been children together. That we had known each other before, at a time of our own innocence, before the weight of trauma and losses of the heart had piled up. Before the many years of external pressures and societal conditioning molded us into the separate, protected individuals we’d become.
In the days that follow, like a rewired computer, I watch the adults around me morph into the children they’d once been. Something had happened to the frame through which I saw others. It was more than new vision. It was some kind of madly hatched superpower.
Of course, it was easier when I watched people from afar, people passing in silence in front of my car as I stopped at a red light. But even the adults sitting across from me in meetings had transformed. Just beneath the surface of their serious words, complex sentences and well-practiced personas I could see the younger, softer versions of themselves. All of them as 4 year-olds, carefree spirits, looking out at the world in wonder, emanating lightness of being.
As long as I kept my attention on the armor and conditioned responses of the adults in front of me, I remained locked in the same but of my own making. From this place of attention, I wrestle with power, I struggle to negotiate perception, I remain mostly alone.
But the moment I imagined them as the children they once were, I experienced their tenderness, a tenderness that lies just beneath the surface like the pulse of blood you feel when you press your fingertips to a wrist.
My new attention, becoming new vision, was helping me see around their projections, underneath their protections, beyond their objections. It was guiding me to feel into their beginnings, alongside their insecurities, and closer to their fragility. It was, simply put, a pivot. Yet a radical pivot that lifted my foot off the breaks of the resistance that maintained a wall of separation between me and others. Between me and connection. Between me and innocence. Theirs, and more importantly, my own.
My innocence. It may be the last part of me I’ve wanted to acknowledge. I’ve already acknowledged so many of my shadows, those neglected parts of me I deny that wreak havoc in my relationships. But I’ve sought them out and, for the most part, found a way to understand what they need.
Not so my innocence. My innocence and I have mostly lived apart. In a world of competition and scarcity, I couldn’t afford to know my innocence. It would not–it did not–help me to survive. Because unlike so much of the adult world, innocence has no guile, no pretension. It’s sincere. It wonders aloud. It knows very little. It feels alongside and with the world, not apart from it. It’s unapologetic about its needs. And to survive it must trust what it sees and experiences as it is, not as we project it to be.
It’s my innocence I met on the street corner that night in the form of an older man from Arkansas asking for some spare change. I meet it in children. I meet it every day in the sweet dog that sleeps at the foot of my bed. I meet it in a relationship with a friend and lover whose life has not hardened him like most people.
But none of these has opened me so much to my own innocence as has seeing it in every other human around me where it’s not so obvious and doesn’t want to be seen. Seeing it everywhere doesn’t come naturally. Seeing it everywhere is a practice. But seeing it everywhere is washing away the old defenses and creating more space for acceptance.
And seeing it everywhere is asking me to feel my grief. The grief of having spent an unknowable time unable to experience our shared innocence, the only place from which we can actually, truly connect.
So, I invite you to wonder aloud about your own innocence. What’s keeping you from asking him or her to come in from the cold and stay for while? How long has it been since you shared a cup of tea? Not just with proxies for your innocence in the form of children, lovers or loyal dogs, but in you.
Without a relationship to our own innocence, we will likely not recognize it in others. Without a relationship to our own innocence, we will struggle to understand much less actually forgive one another. Without a relationship to our own innocence, I feel with increasing urgency, we will not survive this next chapter of human evolution seeking expression on what feels like a very tender planet.
Lucky for us, it’s only a pivot of attention. Albeit a radical one.
WARD SERRILL
26 Nov 2016Lisa…a great silence entered me as I read this…and it is still percolating. A silence full of appreciation. For your willingness to stumble, repeatedly in the face of life’s very real disappointments, and stand up and feel the vulnerability of life…to be open to your experience and to learn. Lastly to share it, to write it. This is very helpful to me. I thank you. – ward
Marilee
26 Nov 2016Thank you for youth heart words–they freshly pried open my wellcap and resonated with my intention to be open to the messages of the rage and the joy around us every and all day. I love the way you tell it.
Frances McCue
26 Nov 2016Lisa, I am so grateful to you for writing this. Thanks to you, I am so much better able to see into my own heart and into the hearts of people around me. Thank you so muc! It’s powerful.
Neirs
27 Nov 2016At the core, essential and as always beautifully expressed by you Lisa. This innocence brings joy, true happiness, relieves stress yet stepping in fully…wow…how do I do it? What about the societal expectations….fuck! And your superpower, very nice image. Easier on the spirit when there is innocence in the eyeballs of those around us. Mine surfaces when I think of my favorite superhero, Elastogirl. I’ll be conjuring her up more often now! I’ll ask her to help me sort for sincerity, honesty, kindness, compassion, unconditional love… Hey you’re awesome! I am so very grateful to have met you and to be on your email list! Love for the holidays to you and your family, Neris
Lucien Pellegrin
27 Nov 2016Lisa,
Thank you for sharing so much of your heart with the world. Thank you for not being hardened and bitter. We need as many light workers as we can possibly manifest. You have reminded me in many different times of my life to be strong, to shine, to not give up. Maybe you were not aware that you were there for me in these ways. But you were. And you continue to share your time and heart with so many. I admire how patient you are with us and yourself. I am learning how to believe in my self. How to believe in us, the people that want peace. That want inclusively, that want love, that want to be our true selves so we can remind others that it’s ok to be sweet, it’s ok not to know, it’s ok to wonder out loud, to drop the front, to cry in front of one another.. So much work to do. I hope you know we are here for you too. Love you tons -Lucien
Meegan McKiernan
27 Nov 2016Ah, Lisa…heartfelt thanks for this articulate and moving soul-share of your journey, your vulnerability, your discoveries. And for reminding us to move from the place of the “we” rather than our own boundaried, safe little places from which we do safe little things. For inviting us to be far more expansive and fearless going forward. I’m going to look at where there are boundaries that I can dissolve in my own life. (Like, posting publicly on a blog what I am feeling in my heart….here goes!)
Joan Caine
27 Nov 2016Lisa I am so grateful for your words. My soul is soothed.
Burr Stewart
28 Nov 2016Thanks for articulating this. I have been recently thinking about how much I enjoyed reading “the emperor’s new clothes” as a kid, and the smug pleasure of knowing that we lived in a free society without kings. Now it seems that we have regressed, and nothing from the lips of our new king can be trusted to be true. We will all need our “innocent” inner childs to speak up now!
Ken
29 Nov 2016Thank you. Please keep writing and inspire us to do the same!
vicky edmonds
2 Dec 2016thank you for laying bare the pure sweetness of vulnerability, lisa. it feels like the only way there can be true things between us, and the longing and the lack of them can make us feel as if we’re evaporating inside the package. in*nocent – not to harm… let this christmas be a time of no harm to anyone or ourselves with a loss of this kind of breathing. many blessings, lisa, and much love. may the darkest days of the year continue to bring the light of your spirit to the world.