healing library.

Before March 2020, we couldn’t have possibly imagined the absolute chaos, destruction, and suffering this pandemic would bring about. Two years later, we now have more memories, a different perspective of the world, a deeper understanding, and completely new avenues in which to imagine. The question is now–how do we integrate and understand those experiences so as to build a future that we not only need, but also desire?

Another part of this forgiveness is the freedom you give yourself to admit when it feels like you can no longer endure. You didn’t fail because the world got too heavy. Breaking down and tapping into all of the feelings of, “this is all a bit too much right now,” can be powerful, healing, and guide you toward the next best thing you can do for you and your future self.

Endurance involves acceptance, commitment, and resolve from the very beginning until the absolute end. And in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has meant masking, distancing, and staying away from large gatherings from March 2020 till now (and at this rate, well into the future).

I tend to feel uneasy during times of celebration and often begin to worry that all of this is too good to be true or that if I believe in the praise I’m getting then I’ll become egotistical and inherently bad–it’s pretty fucked up. Which is why I need forgiveness/ self-acceptance smack-dab in the middle of my celebrations.

For this month, maybe “experiment” or “play” would be better suggestions than “work,” since the formal ideas of labor and celebration seem to be perfect antonyms in our culture. But then again, why shy away from the reality of the feelings we’re facing during this time? Afterall, the whole point of this Year of Healing project is to welcome in the truths coming up for us.

If that drink after work with friends leaves you emotionally and physically hungover, is it really celebrating anything at all or is it just repeating an easy pattern that solves a short-term problem, denying anything deeper? Maybe even start by defining what celebrations mean to you, because for some people it might include some shedding of energy or health. For me, it has to be replenishing. I cannot wake up the next morning exhausted and feel as if any celebration was actually accomplished.

Without forgiveness, we might as well be wholly embalmed in our past understanding and ways of life, locked in a karmic coffin of “it’s always been this way.” But stepping up to the challenges of our day to accept the truth and the divinity of our own mortality is to live and die sustainably, for the greater good.

We are nothing without death. We must learn to coexist with its beautifully chaotic nature or we will continue to lose sight of purpose and hope. Get comfortable in your own skin to the point of no longer needing it.

Death cannot have just one definition because the meaning of our existence can be defined in as many ways as it can be experienced; so is true of death. And other people’s lives can (and should) impact us and affect our view of life just as their passing has the potential to do so, as long as we open ourselves up to the grief they inspire.

But the ultimate truth is that my relationship with death, like most any relationship, is rather complicated. It ebbs and flows the more I see of it and the greater contexts in which I can relate to it. Finding it in the snack aisle at the grocery store or feeling death as a kiss by a gust of wind. Sometimes it is sweet and other times haunting.

We’ve been counting deaths for a year and a half. Everyday we have new and rising death-toll numbers. And we often see them as abstract, forgetting they are neighbors and family members. Real flesh and blood. It’s easy to outsource death as a statistic and keep it safely as such, rather than accepting that we are part of the sum. Our lives have been on the line for 18 months and having to navigate that reality can simply become too much.

Forgiveness dulls the sharp edge (which our culture teaches should be around emotional expression) thus allowing us to actually feel what needs to be felt in order to begin the healing process. You can’t cope with emotional turmoil that you keep hidden from yourself. And our society often markets “self-care” as a convenient hiding place for our emotions, rather than creating free and liberating pastures in which to explore true healing modalities through emotional awareness.

Many of us lost vital emotional outlets--disconnecting from each other for the greater good has been just as detrimental (personally) as it has been beneficial (communally). It wasn’t easy and it certainly isn’t getting any easier. We just might be getting used to it, a little better at hiding our deepest despairs from ourselves. This is a troubling reality, but it’s one reason why I decided this month’s theme should be “coping,” because it seems as if now we must cope with our coping mechanisms if that makes sense…

It is much easier to divide our worldly existence between the times we suffer and the times we breathe easily, rather than accept a holistic view that work, politics, family, climate crisis, and all else co-exist with our moments of pleasure and ease.

To cope is to do the best with what we have. Coping is never perfect and it certainly isn’t a science. After months of obsessive reading and writing, I still felt empty. And to this day there is still a void within me to which no amount of long walks, meditating, skateboarding, painting, or the like could fill.

We feel entitled to our resentments often because there is a personal wound that they’re trying so desperately to keep hidden. Our culture makes a habit out of keeping us in the entitlement rather than encouraging us to work through the emotions until we weep for our own pain that we keep enacting onto others. It is a much more heartbreaking process to traverse our wounds and take responsibility rather than doubling down on our initial defensiveness. We must allow this process to split us open, revealing all of the instances in which we have lived through examples of the harm we now unintentionally inflict on our communities.

What did you learn from your childhood about being a member of a community? Not in words, but in actions. How did you see people being treated? The written rules and lived experiences gave me contradicting ideals as I sat in pews, hearing moms critique the way that other families dressed for church. It is now my work to tap into my instincts and trust myself enough to build communities that function differently than the hypocrisy of the most readily available communal-model I had: a white-washed Catholic school running on oil money.

The process is the work. There’s no way around it except to do it, to spiral into it. The work is to not only let it unfold in front of you, but also to step into the flow with it, building a relationship with the processes of your life.

Knowing which tools you have and when you usually reach for them seems like such a simple and subconscious process, but when you shed light onto it, gaining intimate knowledge of yourself, more tools (and breathing room) reveal themselves to you. Tumultuous times lose their once-loud message of, “this is the end of the world,” so you can hear yourself respond to the more potent questions of, “what can I do in this moment?” and, “what do I actually need?”

We can process our intentions and set intentions for our processes. It’s about tuning into what’s in front of us and gauging the effectiveness of our reactions.