Since my return to the US after a summer across the Atlantic, I’ve felt the way my body adjusts to the landscape here. I’ve again been moving from a place of forever forward; this takes me into a quicker pace, one that’s less connected to myself and everyone around me. I can’t feel the fullness, the past, my lineage. This is the shape that the US empire has rewarded and demanded of me, of most of us aiming to avoid being crushed.
As always, I can only manage the tilt toward what’s yet to be for so long. Eventually, what’s happening now, what’s already unfolded, demands my attention. Marcellus Williams was who called me back to the present this time. When I read that our collective attempts to save his life failed, my body tried to lean through it. If I didn’t let the anguish this loss brought on, I could keep moving. I managed nearly an entire day before it hit.
The familiar sense of powerlessness, that no matter how hard or soft we fight for justice, this country only allows crumbs of justness, if that. The echoes of another nearly $9 billion package of weapons, the threat of more US boots on the ground in Lebanon, the perpetual evisceration of Palestine & those who are born of that land, they broke through, too. I collapsed under the weight of more violence, the grief of Marcellus’ son, the lives that have and will be taken by brute, colonial force.
This is a freeze that’s painfully familiar. As a white woman from Coloradan suburbs, I’m well-equipped with tools to navigate the world around me with niceness (not to be confused with kindness). I know how to maintain a mask to conceal feelings that aren’t bright, palatable. But when the curtain falls, as it always does, the truth that the world is not operated by what is right is re-revealed. My practiced numbness fails. I sink into the muck of centuries-old violence, present-day murder of bodies and spirit. The leaning forward can only support and move me for a spell before the truth breaks back in.
I wonder what my responsibility is; as someone who has committed my adult life to fighting against US empire, what does it mean to leave behind this place that’s deeply benefitted me, broken me, and terrorized people and communities I care deeply about? I got word on Monday that my visa to Ireland would be approved. The news brought with it excitement to return to the soft, connected, joyful shape my body expands into. There was fear around the many unknowns that such a leap demands. And, in moments like these, there’s enormous amounts of guilt. What does it mean to walk away from the battle for liberation for all of us?
I’ve come to believe that the way forward often means we must first go back. Ireland is a return to the last place my ancestors were in relationship with a landscape that wasn’t about exploitation, disconnection. Moving from a place of intellectually understanding of how land is sacred, how we cannot separate ourselves from the living entity that sustains us isn’t the same as feeling these truths. I deeply believe that in order to transform the world, we need to move from a place beyond the mind, a place of feeling, sensing, imagining.
When I landed back on US soil last month, I hoped the ocean would be what would maintain me as she often is. When my eyes landed for the first time in months on the Pacific, I was racked with sobs. This was no longer the ocean that my body had a relationship with, and the grief for the Irish sea overwhelmed me.
As I move backward toward the land of my lineage, I pray it’s an act of moving toward a future where we don’t look away from the truth. I celebrate the impending removal of myself from the empire that has been and continues to violate its own claimed values. May I make my life an invitation for those around me to move backward, to return to a place of feeling.
How can we allow the cycle to continue if we let ourselves feel it?
