A meditation for those trying to live a life of allyship to those who are being oppressed
I stop the clock on my everyday life
Slow my breathing
Wait until I can hear the river of my blood rushing through my arteries
And try to arrive
(God, why is it so hard simply to be where we are?)
I grant myself the grace of time
Allow myself to float, lily-pad-like, atop the Ground of Being
In this flowing place
I bring to mind
And, more importantly, to heart
This fragile, pulsating human world of ours
All its woes and its hurts and its wrongs
The lives that are cut short
Hearts broken
Bodies abused
Truths denied
By our wild, unwieldy, growing-like-weeds systems
And we, the people who uphold and protect them in ways large and small, obvious and subtle
How rightly wounding it is to try to feel the pain of others
To connect with these truths
Is to be a rubber dinghy in a flood
But I hold my course, anchored in my breath
I remain with it
I stay faithful
I watch and pray
And then, I ask:
May I hold these truths in my heart
May I take the actions that these truths demand
The actions that I uniquely can take
May I carry my portion, with love and with graciousness and with rage,
May I not allow my heart to callus over
And, when I do numb out or give up,
When I despair at the endless walk towards an unseen horizon,
May I bring myself back to this place
And begin again
To release my droplets of awareness into the flood.
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