Peace Love Chocolate Cake
One is recurrently at a loss. One picks oneself up dusts oneself off starts all over again. One can’t go on, one goes on. One sings, same as it ever was even though it really isn’t. One sings, what’s so funny about peace love and understanding. One reads “Tired” by Langston Hughes:
Tired by Langston Hughes
— Beinecke Library (@BeineckeLibrary) April 15, 2021
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Langston Hughes Papers https://t.co/8PHmLZxa7D pic.twitter.com/uynUHtPq4h
One watches Promising Young Woman (one of the best movies I’ve ever seen NK).
One avoids toxic positivity but along with the rest of the rubbish and despair of the world, the unfairness, the intolerable injustices, the unconscionable behaviour of willfully misinformed asses, one also allows some beauty. One makes good things. One attempts. Flowers really do help, as my good man Robert Lemay has said.
One wearies of the endless space the Covid-deniers take up. So.
How to fill up space better? Planting flowers, both metaphorically and literally? (If you’re reading in the newsletter, you might like to click into the browser to watch this next video).
What I’m thinking about this past week, amidst the news of the day, which is overwhelming, but to some degree unavoidable, (I can’t turn it off because I think that’s a luxury I can’t indulge in right now) is how to fill up some of the limited space left over with something useful? How to amplify things that lift us up even a little bit right now?
How to be useful in the way that “Just One Person” in NYC is?
Here is a thing I posted on Twitter this past week:
You are more than one thing. You live in multiple registers, now more than ever. And yet it’s holding together, you are holding it together in a world tricky and challenging. You are here and you are wonderful and good. pic.twitter.com/rdEtfTupHs
— Shawna Lemay (@shawnalemay) April 15, 2021
We are learning about ourselves in all sorts of new ways these days. I know that seems to be a refrain of mine of late. I subscribe to Margaret Wheatley’s newsletter, and in it there was a line that was of interest to me:
“Warriors need to know themselves so well that they don’t get in the way, so they can discern what others need from them. The commitment to self-knowing is not to attain personal peace, happiness, respect or love. It is to be a clear, non-egoic presence of insight and compassion.”
I don’t love the word warriors, but the rest of this rings true for me. Just knowing what our own triggers are (and whoa I seem to have a lot these days) can help us get out of our own way, which is a commonplace, but helpful to think about.
I was recently having a small discussion with someone on IG about our angers and our darknesses. I am maybe at the stage where I have identified a few new dark parts of my soul. And I think there is a value in sharing those, but that also there is so much darkness right now, that I don’t think it’s a useful time for me to sort of interrogate it in public. Others have more pressing issues, more is at stake currently. I was thinking about the difference between taking dark things into a dark time vs taking something dark into a light place. And really, just the privilege to even be mulling over stuff like that gives me pause.
Maybe it’s worth something small though to yell out, yes I am dealing with the new dark parts of my soul! I honestly don’t know if this is true.
I think part of me would rather be planting flowers in unexpected place on a city street. But there is another part of me that feels it’s worthwhile to just sit and try to understand.
"I will admit that there are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens."
— Samantha Rose Hill (@Samantharhill) April 12, 2021
— Hannah Arendt pic.twitter.com/UZoHZqmFaH
Maybe I’m going to do a decent job of that, maybe not. But I’m going to at least try and sort a few things about this time we’re currently in. I’m probably going to do most of it BTS, and perhaps share it a later date. Or perhaps it will just be embedded in my work in other ways.
Which brings me to chocolate cake. Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the way I’ve based this blog on the imperative that we are required to make something beautiful. And lately I’ve been sort of on a downer and all, what’s the point really? about that. But then. But then, I bought this small chocolate cake for 5 dollars at the grocery store. Does anyone ever think, that there are enough chocolate cakes in the world and why should they bake another? (I know this is not my most profound thought and yet it made me laugh a bit and carry on. So).
So yes, I still believe we are required to make something beautiful. I do believe in peace love and understanding. I believe in at least trying to understand whatever the heck is happening in this pandemic. I believe in being real rather than positive, per se. Because there’s a lot coming at all of us all the time now, a lot to process, a lot to navigate. And mainly, we need to stay safe, which is how people at the beginning of the pandemic ended their emails (maybe still do?) and which seems increasingly imperative.
