A Will to Love

At times we can feel so confined to what we must do, that we neglect what we can do.

In times of great loss, we can often get lost in the collective emotion. Be it anger, sorrow, hate, or confusion, how we've learn to process emotions in our life will come front and center and often ride out the initial reaction for us; and that's why I chose to start this writing out with, "At times we can feel so confined to what we must do, that we neglect what we can do."

No one person nor entity can tell you how to grieve, no one person can tell you how to show up for community, but these are things we must do in order to build a better world that we are borrowing from our children. These lessons come to us not just by standing ideally by hoping and praying but by the action and commitment to a Will to Love, by the commitment to nurture the spaces that are most often neglected, by committing to not just speaking or typing on how we can change, but by acting today.

These actions look like embracing the emotions we feel in these moments and, as often as it can happen for some of us, if the emotions become too overwhelming, finding someone or a community of people we can lean on so as to not process these emotions alone; the greater goal being the building and nurturing of a community that we can process these moments with. We are not machines that process trauma just to go about our days, though most of how we as a country deal with great loss would have one believe so. We are the Spirit that is connected to the cycle of life on this planet, we are that which has a great capacity to hurt, to grieve, and to love. We are not a system of government, we are a singular body, all of us, the trees, the water, the Earth and animals, all these forces of life that we all feel everyday, all at once, we are them, and they are us. The very same force that in times like these we seem to forget, and worse, some try to manipulate.

A crucial step in the change that is needed to alter the direction of these consuming currents is the realization that the radical Love that is needed for great change is locked behind suffering, like the child that will be too curious of the ant hill, we have built a system of compassion that facilitates suffering as a necessary step in change. We must remind ourselves and others daily that it is not suffering nor oppression that makes us stronger, those often man made things stifle and stunt our growth, it is our Will to Love that gives us strength, that burns the hottest when our darkest moments fall upon us.

We are not stronger because of the pain we go through, we go through the pain and are stronger still.

So when someone ask, "well what would you do then?' I hope your answer isn't the force you would take but the way you would love the person before they choose to take their pain out on those around them. We will not see this change by the action of the hammer and gun, only by great compassion of the heart and the ability to fight those who would have you sustain the systems that proliferate this sickness of the soul.