— A letter from Matteah —
When I look around at the state of the world, it is easy to get overwhelmed and caught up in despair. We are living in tenuous times.
Wars.
Genocide.
Racial and ethnic violence.
State sponsored oppression.
Political instability.
Economic instability.
Pandemics.
Climate Change.
Natural disasters.
Ecosystem collapse.
Loss of biodiversity.
Exponential population growth.
Persistent inequality.
Ideological divisions.
Technological growth.
Epidemics of loneliness.
This all feels so dark.
How can we be? What can we do?
How can we ever truly transform these systems?
The enormity of what we are facing is beyond what my mind can handle. It is difficult to bear…
In the midst of all our crisis, this truth recently became evident to me:
Our capacity to be in darkness also signals our capacity to be in light.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash
This truth brought to my mind the words of folks like Adrienne Marie Brown, Shawn Ginwright, and Jared Rosenbaum. They remind me that while we are confronted with our capacity to destroy, throughout our human history, we have also demonstrated a great capacity to create, restore, tend, steward and care. While we have created many problems, we also have the capacity to dream, imagine and create possibilities.
What if, when we see our capacity to hate, we also recognize our extreme capacity to love?What if, when we see our suffering, we also remember our capacity to experience joy and delight?
What if it isn’t one or the other. But BOTH/AND?
How might we open our arms, our minds, and our hearts wide enough to hold the vastness of these polarities?
To hold the expansiveness of the BOTH/AND? The light and the dark together?
I’m setting my intention to stay open.
To stay wide.
Wide enough to not turn away or divert my eyes from the darkness.
But wide enough to also let my eyes adjust to the brilliance of the light that exists.
And perhaps you can help me to do this too. By sharing with me your stories of the light you see. By reminding me of the goodness we all carry.
And I can do the same for you.
Till then,
Matteah