Seeing Clearly from the Bottom of the Well

I have never been in despair about the world.  I've been enraged by it. I don't think I'm in despair. I can't afford despair. I can't tell my nephew, my niece. You can't tell the children there's no hope.
James Baldwin


Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.   L.R. Knost


I am neither young nor naive.  I have lived in the shadowlands of America my entire life, experiencing a world that white America regularly either denies the existence of, in part or in full. So I am puzzled by my own brokenness as my reality emerges more and more each day, where the nonsensical is being made normal before the eyes of white of surprised and confused people. While there is a part of me that is enjoying an "I told you so". In the main, I am not comforted by these new or invigorated allies. I feel instead a deep weariness.

I have often pushed back against any idea that this path of awakening is sweet, though there can be sweetness found along the way. I believe this is especially true for black people.  Being fully in touch can be painful as hell. Awareness is the antithesis to numbness. The pain of life is no longer something that can be escaped through various false refuges.

So what am I left with? I touch into that inquiry every day and often several times a day, particularly when the depth of racist murderous activity is videoed for my consumption. So what does this practice give me to move in freedom even as the slave master psionically lashes my back? For me, it is to cradle myself in my lineage. I let my heart break with my lineage,  a heart that this insane construction in which I have spent my life believes I don not have. I sit with the children sold and raped to make other children to be sold and raped.  I sit with those burying the mothers, fathers, children who have been killed because of white upset and arrogance.  I sit with the mothers and fathers moaning, I sit with Emmett and his mother, I sit with Trayvon and his last breath, I sit with his mother receiving the call that her baby was killed for walking on the sidewalk. I sit and cry and I hold them and they hold me and remind me my son is alive for now.

I also sit with their laughter at the end of the day and smile at the suspicious glance of slave masters, overseers, supervisors, and bosses who wonder why and how they/we are laughing and what we/I may be up to. I sit with greens with hot sauce and my mother cooking them and singing about greens off  key. I sit with dancing with with grandmother and having a party,  just the two of us. I sit with the miracle of my life, the miracle of my breath, knowing I was never meant to survive.

 I sit with the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.

'Cause trouble don't last always and Pharaoh's army got drowned in the sea. I sit in silence and trust.