Making Reparations

I have an invitation to share with you, as it came to me. I do not claim to understand it all – and can only pretend to live it in the most subtle and half-hearted ways – but these are the words that brimmed over when I asked, “What should I tell them?” Take them, leave them, recycle, compost, or burn them – whatever your heart calls you to do. My best attempt at honoring them is to offer them to you freely, with absolutely no expectation, and to wait, quietly, for whatever comes next.

Enjoy this 16-minute read, or let me read it to you via the like at the top of the webpage. 

If Life brings you to your knees, stay there. Be willing to walk the long, dark corridor of no hope. Remain in that posture of submission and reverence and maybe, just maybe, something divinely inspired will come through. Because what you need, and what our world needs, isn’t more of what we think are solutions. It’s something from far beyond us, something that’s been trying to push through, something that can’t touch our world unless we can set ourselves aside become willing channels. Something that will begin to unravel everything we’ve done from our greed and fear and forgetting, and bring us back to our root, to the place where something truly wonderous and beautiful can sprout in service to all life. Because isn’t that what we know we’re here for, deep in the soil of our bellies: allowing Mystery to steward and marvel at life itself?

Everything we believe are our failures, our intimate struggles, our unique hero’s journey through the trials of life are really the story of the universe, our planet, and humanity itself living through us – seeking expression, seeking resolution. We suffer because we have inflicted vast suffering. Personally, consciously of course our harms have likely been minor and mostly unintentioned, but our lives are not our own. The harms of our civilization, our species are ours as much as our ingenuity and altruism – ours to turn over and mold in our palms, ours to own as the shadows we unknowingly cast simply by standing.

The epidemic of loneliness and isolation that touch us all is the biggest delusion we face. We have not only forgotten our place in the network of life, but we’ve forgotten that we’ve forgotten. We’re so far removed from living within an ecosystem – even the ecosystem of our families and communities – that we believe that what we do, think, and feel are about us alone and are our responsibility. Nothing could be further from the truth. We share in the harvest – nourishing or poisoned – of each and every person, plant, season, ancestor, descendent we are woven into. The fact that we’ve forgotten this, or that at the very least it lives in us merely as a theoretical concept, doesn’t make a bit of difference. This is the truth of it, rooted in the fundamental laws from which our universe sprang and is continually renewed.

So whatever you feel, especially the loneliness, separation, fear, and isolation, let that be the first step of your journey home. Do not throw yourself into the arms of the first comfort you encounter – and our civilization endures by offering us many. Let the ache – the guilt, the hopelessness, the rage – fill you until it becomes your steps, becomes the very road you walk, and it may just lead you to a place of truth, of revelation, beyond anything your conditioned mind can conceive. If you are lucky enough to visit that place, even for a few breaths, you will see that your redemption and ours and theirs are inseparable. You will see how no true remorse, forgiveness, or reparation can occur without full-fledged feeling of what has been wrought to us and through us. This experience binds and transforms us at a profound level. It requires our submission, our endurance, and most of all our love – a love that knows we are meant for more than our petty, selfish desires, a love that thrills at the infinitely diverse sovereignty of Life, a love that knows our posture is one of service, of willingness to give whatever it takes to serve Life itself, even if that brings us a small loss, or the seeming finality of death.

If you struggle with addiction – with compulsively doing what you are fully aware causes harm – know that this is because of what you lost or never received, and that you’ve been taught to seek empty comforts. You sobbed for your mother’s embrace and were given a cookie. You raged over being bullied or vilified, and found confidence in the bottle. You were invisible unless you were serving others and now you cannot stop giving yourself away. Your pain, your efforts to shift these deeply engrained behaviors are born of a civilization that forgot how to care for its people, who forgot the teachings and rituals that show us our place in the world, guide us to face our demons, and be reborn from the land itself. Addiction is the child of humanity’s tendency toward greed (as strongly as we also tend toward love and sacrifice), which severed our mutuality with all of Life so we felt free to have more of whatever we wanted.

The foundational pain we feel – the one we are seeking to soothe ever more urgently and ineffectively – is that of exile. The only way home is to feel our way toward reconnection, toward a wholeness that was lost generations if not millennia in the past. We may never succeed in this lifetime, but feeling our way in the right direction is crucial to not getting even deeper into the mess we’ve already made of our lives and our world. This path takes us through much painful truth, much of which is far beyond our capacity to rectify or even influence, but which we face because that is the path of love. Love does not gaslight. It is strong enough to hear and see the pain of those who are wounded without turning away. Love does not promise us comfort or joy, but it does offer the consolation of belonging to this world through the felt sense that whatever it holds is ours as well.

If you struggle with poor health – with infections, aches, moods, malignancy, exhaustion – know that this is because you live in a toxic world of stress and pollutants borne of our willingness to silence the voice of our bodies, the land, and all its inhabitants in order to take what we want and leave what we don’t. Masking or treating the symptoms enables us to limp along a bit further, but to avoid encountering what health really is. Health is our body in tune with our environment, with all the nuances of our physical, emotional, mental, energetic, and cosmic bodies. Health hums and the doors to wisdom and beauty open through us.

To reach that threshold, we must be willing to release what sickness is insisting on pulling away from us. We must put down the toxic foods and products. We must release our rapid pace. We must miss out on dozens of things so we can rest more deeply. We must surrender unnecessary and unrealistic expectations. In effect, we must allow ourselves to renounce all the stimulants and activities that keep us hyped, in constant motion, blind and deaf to the subtle messages within and around us. We have stripped, murdered, and polluted our world, and now our own bodies are paying the price. We treat our bodies like chattel beasts and we do not hesitate to poison them and punish them for our amusement or to satisfy our misdirected neuroses. We must face the likely irreparable damage we’ve caused our own flesh if we are to reconnect with the innate instinct that recoils from causing harm. How can we love and care for ourselves – or anything – if we cannot feel its suffering, hear its needs, and surrender ourselves to being its caretakers? Only when we understand what it means to regenerate our own soil can we contemplate what it may mean to be protectors and stewards for other bodies and the body of the earth itself.

If you are plagued by a lack of purpose, of direction in life, of meaningful work and relationships – know that this emptiness is borne of a civilization that has taught us it is virtuous to pursue our own happiness, wealth, and satisfaction. In reality, the deepest fulfillment comes from occupying our unique niche within an ecosystem, which is fundamentally tied to our entire human and more-than-human community. It does not guarantee our happiness or even our survival – often, it delivers the opposite, for ultimately every being gives its body to feed another. But occupying our niche compensates us with an enduring sense of rightness – of being in the right place at the right time, doing precisely what is needed, which is the ideal vantage point for witnessing splendor.

Within a worldview of exponential prosperity for all, those necessarily enslaved within others’ delusions of grandeur consider themselves failures – for not having worked hard enough or dreamed big enough. What actually limits you isn’t your own failure or lack of worth, but a system that – instead of serving Life – serves up an artificial (temporary) reality that aspires to thwart universal laws. Your lack of meaning is born of civilization that has forgotten what really matters and that – despite the freedom and progress it professes – actually values soul-crushing tedium and empty pleasures. Your grief, rage, and frustration over your position is a vital step towards recovering what has truly been lost – not your success or even your potential – but an entire way of living founded on what human beings actually are: caretakers, healers, protectors, artists.

Do not be tricked or numbed by the next self-help seminar. Being your biggest, brightest self within a capitalist system is tragically misguided. We do not occupy our niche by convincing others of their failures and promising condescending, short-sighted solutions. We step into our place when we simply listen deeply and follow the subtle, mysterious guidance we receive – simple steps on how to be, where to direct our attention, how to support what is already trying to unfold or decay. What does or doesn’t sprout from our actions is none of our business. The idea of “business” itself needs to be recycled. Show up in whatever survival dance you find yourself and serve whatever is trying to happen around you. That is the purest way to compensate for our civilization’s long obsession with profiting at others’ expense. Meaning and purpose aren’t commodities. We must accept that we – like all creatures – are fulfilling our duty simply by being here even, and especially, when it’s beyond our conscious awareness or direct benefit.

When life brings you to your knees, stay there. When you’ve failed at everything you’ve tried to achieve, at getting healthy, finding love, feeling safe, feeling important, curl up inside that gapping hole of hopelessness. You are actually on the threshold of reality – your awareness one step closer to being reborn into the true story of Life itself, which our civilization has denied you because honesty does not serve its aims. Living based on the universal laws inevitably makes you a misfit in a world built to defy them, so learning to embrace “being a failure” is necessary to regaining your authentic life. What you receive in exchange for being humbled, left out, and left behind is a far greater sense of freedom.

To survive in this world, we will always have to compromise our time, our energy, and sometimes even our morality, but the pain we feel at this sacrifice will be aimed in the right direction. We will eschew trying to beat the system at its own game and focus ourselves instead on a completely new way of being, one that the soil of our world is not yet ready to support, but that must live as seed within our bodies if it is to find fertile ground. Nurture it in stillness, in darkness, in whispers with those who can be trusted to honor it. Let the warmth of this ember soothe the chill of your tired soul. Let your love for the wonder and beauty it will one day become give you strength to yield to the still, small voice.

Do not despair if you are unwilling or unable to endure whatever it asks of you. We are children of epochs of violence and forgetting. Life has infinite compassion and understanding for the conditioning that has enabled us to survive just like every other precious being. Whatever you suffer is – far from being your failure – a light on your path home. Feel its mark on your life, on the story of humanity, and let yourself be reabsorbed into what this planet really is and what it will continue to be – with or without us. It’s a vision of beauty, of mystery, of reverence; a thing that embraces and encompasses all things, even those things we find most cruel and unforgivable. It’s a thing worthy of what feels like our most profound sacrifice, but is in truth a massive windfall of the boundless abundance of Life rushing to us. Even if all we can offer is our grief and despair over what we’ve done and can never rectify, it’s enough to signify that we are open and ready enough to re-engage.

When life brings you to your knees, stay there. That’s where humans are meant to be – in a posture of reverence and service to the great expanse of Life. We are kneeling on our homeland, and that must be enough. Because most days, it’s all we can do.

Nancy