april intention
monthly theme: [tension]
Tension is created, it’s not just discovered. It is the interaction of this and that, the resentment between us and them. Tension is not a solid object, no matter how heavy it feels. A reaction, it is a state of being, begging you to be awestruck. Tension is an unstudied disease that attacks our lungs...no wait our hearts and all at once, without noticing, we succumb by clenching and attaching, restricting and contracting.
After receiving a metaphorically cartoonish bonk on the head from the shock of March 2020, we awake in our (if lucky, if privileged) home office in a delirious confusion. We focus our energy on the birds circling our heads, rather than taking a moment to catch our breath and ask, “is this really the enemy I want to be fighting?” Time is lost as the shockwaves settle us into the long haul lull that has been the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s unsettling, it’s debilitating, and it’s still, somehow only the beginning. The air is heavy, but we can’t remember the spiralling cartoon birds that distracted us from what’s actually going on in front of us. We divide ourselves into two camps, thankful that semantics already exist even though we were warned against it. One with masks, one without. My theory is that both sides have the same motivating force:
We’re afraid, all of us traumatized by the unknowingness of particles in the sky--particles we’re unfortunately still learning about day by day. It’s chaos and the only way most of us know how to handle such heavy feelings is by pointing a finger or coughing in the face of a stranger so we don’t have to worry about what’s going on within ourselves.
It’s a painful process to ache and look inward instead of out with our confusion and discomfort. But that is the work I felt cornered into this month last year. Maybe this journey was born of my shame around being unemployed and moving back home, but I’ve been working to not rely on a “why” and just experience whatever unfolds in front of me, even if the experience is pure tension. I don’t have to immediately run to release, I can note what makes me clench my jaw in rage and see how that reflects on me and not the outside stimuli.
At times, it felt as if I was building my own torturous cave of mirrors through this practice, only having access to resistance and the echoes of my own sorrow...but there’s something intangible I learned having no one else to blame or project my suffering onto. Of course I tried to scapegoat my parents, but I didn’t like the cave paintings that left on my inner awareness.
I am thankful for the clarity and motivation the tension gave me. Although I had invited it in, intentionally cultivating a relationship with all of “this and that” which exists inside me, the contradictions proved more pregnant with wisdom than I ever imagined. The importance of this time, which words will ultimately fail to comprehend, was a shift--a transition in the key of paradox.
I see all of the ways I “failed” in April 2020, but the perspective I have now is that there is no such thing as “failing.” I was clawing through the dark alongside everyone else. Reacting to the tension we all felt. Attempting to save my loved ones from my tension-inspired projections, I entered into my own void where the conflict couldn’t touch me, yet I felt its gravity pulling my heartstrings like Newton’s apple.
Even if we can define a “this” or a “that” (a mask or without), it is the distance (or proximity) between the two points where the lessons exist. I was forever changed by this inner exploration I started in April 2020, but with its anniversary, I am relieved to experience a deeper non-duality and sit in between opposing points that naturally exist within my humanity and my emotional processes.
So when I feel tension between this or that, me and them, I try to find where the tension emanates under my skin, in the folds of my brain, neural pathways indented over generations.