Yesterday I began work on my newest Spirit Doll, Fire Storm.  She was born out of heart break and despair after the Ferguson announcement.  I largely did not post on my FaceBook page except to say that the Ferguson decision was disgusting and that I have no idea what should be done next anymore.  Twenty-five years in community based organizing and all I see is that money has enough power now that there aren’t enough people to beat it.

Long conversations on the posts I did make brought to the fore that the answer to all of this will come from community.  You stay in community not because you love everyone there but because you all share a vision for something, in this place a vision where young black men have value to a society as whole.  I roll into valuing women and children enough not to abuse them, allowing women their bodily integrity and honoring the earth.  For me it is all the same.  That’s a pretty broad community and there will be dissention among the whole, but a shared vision of humanity for the next seven generations (and I borrow that magnificent idea from America’s First People).

Understanding that I don’t have to love all of them is essential for me because I can’t.  I think love is a very nice abstract idea that has so many different personal meanings as to be undefinable.  So  instead of saying “love is the way” (which I’m seeing a lot right now), say “community is the way” and all that infers in terms of living with others who are different than you and finding some way to make that work for the better of all.  I see that as real “work” where so many can just claim that they love everyone and not do one single thing.

Shades of having been raised Catholic and that New Testament book by James which says that acts are a required part of being saved.  I left all of that long

ago, but I kept that concept that acts speak louder than words.  If you indeed do love, show me by your actions.  And yes, there is judgement there.  But I’m not claiming to be perfect here.  I’m claiming to be working on what’s next, in community with a few people I’ve grown to love and trust.

So anyways, in the midst of all this I have been lost as to what’s next.  And not feeling very good about that being a person of action.

The Universe is a funny thing (however you define it or whatever you call it).

We have had a huge pine in our side yard for decades.  It was badly bent by an ice storm a good 15 years back and has always leaned.  Lately it has looked as if it were leaning harder and toward our cars.  Hubby and I spoke of it on and off and neither of us did anything about it.

Today hubby heard a loud crack and thought it was (another) pine tree in our front yard which fell over, dead, against an oak, and which we have expected to crack in half any year now (no cars around).  Looking out it was the side yard pine, down, and inches (literally) away from 2 of our vehicles.  Inches.  Had it snapped lower on it’s spine, it would have gotten the car and van.

Here’s where the Universe comes in.  And how I read stories in events around me – because the world is storied, it’s how we make sense of things, and if ever I needed some sense made of the world, now is the time.  As I was looking at it, the thought dropped in (unbidden – I wasn’t even in the arena of thinking about Ferguson, probably for the first time in about 48 hours) that things fall apart (the pine tree snapped) to open space for new things to grow (a tree down in the forest makes way for all kinds of new growth).

I started Fire Storm yesterday because working with my hands is soothing when my head is going in circle.  I finished her today, and she named herself as a lot of my work is wont to do.  She was intuitively made using a little bit of everything I have on hand.  I had no idea where I was going when I started and am not sure what I have now that she’s finished.  And that’s okay.  Not knowing is okay.  Because I am not responsible for knowing.  I am responsible for participating, in community, with baby steps to what comes next.  I don’t know what that is because it has never been.  I believe that is possible:  something new rising.  I’m pinning my hopes on that belief, and my wishes in the skirt of my Spirit Doll.

This is from my blog, December 3, 2010:

I am, in other words, a midwife to energy.  That is my art’s gift to me – to see things born for the first time.  To bring into being things that never were before.  To leave my fingerprints in the soft clay which fires to hard, to make the metal bend just so, to accrue hard stone and glittery crystal and bring everything together so that it is as unique as the person calling it.  Grace. Over and over each time I open to the impulse to make something.

Here are some other things I’ve learned.  Sometimes you can do everything right and the clay still explodes in the kiln.  Sometimes you can really push the clay to the edges of what you know should work and a bit beyond and something amazing happens.  Broken pieces aren’t trash – you can put them back together in a different configuration and make something even more beautiful.  Remade jewelry and refashioned shards of fired clay show me how what is healed is even stronger and more wonderful than the first iteration.  It reminds me that I can remake myself as many times as I want – that all the pieces will fit back together and sometimes surprise me with what has opened up.

Wishing you serenity and community and family.

Wylde Crone Rising:  Nothing every goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.  It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.  To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  Pema Chodron