IT has no name.

IT whispers without words.

IT carries the earthquakes and the stormy thoughts of the past, in the times we are presently in.

IT is rage and fear, violence and disgust.

IT hurts so much.

Look at the events we have just witnessed and experienced over the past few weeks and

months. We are touching into IT by how we respond -- good, bad, and otherwise. Hapless

rage, raging fear, fearful powerlessness. We become hyper-vigilant or flooded, running

toward or running away from the danger and the violence we witness. Maybe we simply go

dark, numb and disconnected, in the mode we have often used just to survive.

Sometimes, and this is the tough one -- our wires get crossed by the abuse we suffered, and

we wish the same harm to those who do the violence. It doesn’t help. It only repeats inside

the very action that left us in this position in the first place.

But I wonder what would happen if we kept the rage tender, the sorrow true, the grief

honored by meeting IT inside head on? This would be the opposite of passivity, or

capitulation: finding the possibility that emerges when we face the beast. Perhaps IT could

bring us to see the cracks in whatever darkness we inhabit, rescuing little ideas that gleam

for a second in our soul then disappear. Coaxing them back. It means attention to

not this or that but possibly both or some other way entirely....*

We are in the midst of great tumult. It is not easy to respond instead of react in the old

ways. But if we remember we are survivors and have already lived through so much, we

can be fierce in our tenderness, loving in our sorrow and grief, creative and authentic in

our response. Perhaps we hold the younger part of ourselves that has no words with

some respect for all we face with kindness, which itself is a form of courage.

However we meet IT, perhaps this is how in our own way, we change the world around

us and ourselves in the process. However large or small our response, this is the

powerful work of life and of recovery as we confront the situation at hand.

And in this, it is activism in the truest sense.

*. Martin Shaw, "Navigating the Mysteries". Emergence Magazine/org