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CAN YOU FEEL IT? ...
This is not a rhetorical question. Can you feel it? Can you feel it all? Can you feel anything?
It warrants asking, and answering (whether by replying to this newsletter, saying it out loud, saying to to yourself, writing it down...)
It's such a simple question, but a foundational practice. There's been such great effort put into making us feel anything but the truth. Making us feel too much (confused, anxious, overwhelmed) or too little (untethered, uncertain, unsupported, numb).
Our work is always to come back to what we know to be true, deep in our bones, radiating from our hearts, and into the Earth where the soil is the decomposed matter of collective life force. When we feel the way, we know that we are connected to something much greater than ourselves. We are not alone. When we trust the way, we do not have to know the answers. We can open our eyes and our hearts to truly feel our way through it.
There is enough pain in this world to bring us to our knees. I read a statistic yesterday that over 3 million life years have been lost in Gaza in the past two years. If your first inclination is to rush past this - whether to compare it to other tragedies, or stop thinking about it for fear the grief might crush you - I encourage you to sit with it for a minute. Over 3 million life years. This journal article shows graphs and quantifies lives and years in numbers, but we ask that you to take a minute to think about all of the meals not prepared or enjoyed together, the art not made, the prayers not prayed when over 3 million life years are lost. Staggering. What a collective loss. What a gaping wound that will take its time to heal.
When I hear about the fill-in-the-blank tragedy du jour I often think, Who is going to stop this?...until I realize that I am somebody. And while I can't do everything, I can do something. And if enough of us do something, it shifts the tides.
I've noticed an energetic shift in this past week. For years, what seemed like intense overwhelm caused a great majority of people to crave a return to 'business as usual,' or insist on that as the only way onward. It seemed like taking the time or energy for people to sit in the discomfort of the oppressive systems that shape our everyday lives, and find our way out, was simply...too much of a learning curve.
But something shifted this week. In the uncertainty around the discontinuation of SNAP benefits, I saw something snap inside a lot of people I know.
It's not surprising that food - or lack of access to it - can catalyze people into action. The visceral nature of physical nourishment can more easily allow people to imagine what a loss like that could be like - especially if the people impacted are all around you and not across an ocean. It is easy to see it, absorb it, and to know...this is not the way.
I see it across my feed, in my inbox, and on my text threads. People sharing ideas and resources and making and fulfilling simple asks to build a web of support. This is the way.
May we all be a part of this way, the one rooted in what we know to be true - that we are all deserving of love, beauty, abundance, generosity, care, and support. And that we may all be a part of giving and receiving it in equitable measure.
Feel Your Way,
Tay + Dor
This newsletter edition was highly inspired by the song The Way Knows by Lyndsey Scott. We recommend playing it on repeat this week.
photo by Natalie Deryn Johnson
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