Just this morning I was speaking with my eternally optimistic yet abundantly realistic (and sometimes gloomy) youngest child. She came into my room after waking around noontime, all sleepy- headed, still in her pjs’ and she wished me a radiantly joyful happy new year with the same warmth and heel- clicking energy that she brings to all her lovely stage performances in dance and musical theater. Her youthful excitement at the potential for newness which her “happy new year, mom!” contained was wonderfully contagious and made me feel happy and excited too.
Wow—a wonderful sense of joyous contagion!
We spoke about not choking the possibility of newness with a stranglehold of resolutions; about holding it all with the eyes of loving potential with which we gaze upon one newly born and not projecting onto it the harshness of judgment of self or other. In our gazing upon the new year with an immensity of kindness, we can welcome ourselves to hold the new year’s possibility with tenderness. We can cast our hearts’ dreams into its immense sky; bright and wide enough to catch our dream ribbons and then allow the winds of time and the gift of our breath do the rest.
But what about those times in our lives when the dream ribbons we have cast off into the big, bright world get snagged up in one of life's inevitable storms?
As a mindfulness meditation practitioner, I have experienced firsthand the tremendous benefits that welcoming oneself and others to see the potential each new moment holds for ease, for wellness, for healing, for love. My family’s practice of meditation along with daily nature walks has helped each of us traverse our own private difficulties during these long years of pandemic life.
It has helped keep us tethered when the terrible storm of one of our beloved’s revealed trauma threatened to uproot everything we thought our family knew about safety, trust and friendship and all the while during a time of lockdown and distance from the warmth and comfort of the physical presence of family and friends.
What else carried us through this time?
Love!
To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.
Thich Nhat Hanh
We have been carried by the loving and caring support of those persons--our dear parents, siblings, friends, relatives and therapists-- whose words of encouragement, generosity and guidance have and continue to help us weather a long, dark night of suffering many, many seasons deep.
Their love helped to create the space to allow what we were feeling to exist—the whole great big mess of it all. And it’s been messy to say the least and tremendously painful. Still is. But we are here to tell the tale of surviving one of parenting’s and family life's worst nightmares. While admittedly we are still learning, we also are a family who knows a thing or two about making it through hard times.
But so do you.
You have not made it here to now without your own times of personal turbulence which you have weathered or are weathering as best you can with the knowledge, support and means you have at your disposal.
And collectively we are all living in times of tremendous upheaval and unrest and we all do not have the equal means to make it through this time unscathed. This unrest is good in that it represents to me that we are no longer willing to put up with the misery, slog and inequity of maintaining the status quo when the status quo leaves so many persons unrecognized (unloved) and without their basic needs being met with dignity.
Unrest, to me, means change is afoot and oh how desperately we need to welcome change to our collective lives. It represents the destabilization that is necessary for systems wide change to occur.
In this time of great global reckoning with forever present uncertainty, this time of COVID-19 during a climate crisis which too is now a number of season changes deep, there is much we have to be thankful for that the pandemic has laid bare before us and always much to learn from these challenging times.
As Dr Bonnie Henry said in her year- end note, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the immensity of inequities our society has embedded within its very framework and I couldn't agree more:
“…but we’re always going to have to learn some of the lessons from this…Some of them are societal—around the inequities that this virus has exposed and the value that we put on different workers, for example.” Dr Bonnie Henry
Last eve, my friend David Weale sent a note which said about being glad that in 2021 “the pompous prophets of Progress have been exposed.” Many have been exposed and none too soon! No longer are we willing to tolerate that which leaves so many marginalized. There is no normal to go back to. There never was. Each new moment is a chance to create anew! But the new way forward must be more inclusive, more diverse (including the neurodiverse) and much, much more loving and accepting.
Diversity is having a seat at the table, inclusion is having a voice, and belonging is having that voice be heard.
Liz Fosslien
And in doing so, I welcome us all to consider the wonderful work being done to lift people out of poverty and how beneficial a Basic Income Guarantee would be to help us all weather the unstable footing of a global economic shift out of pandemic in an era of widespread climate disruption.
On my little Island, I can only imagine how much better things might have been had we already had BIG in place prior to this pandemic. Perhaps our child poverty rate for children under six at roughly 20% and the high rates of food insecurity and a housing crisis are part of the reason PEI is being considered to pilot BIG in Canada.
And what I speak of is just one little Island where everyone is doing their best to be kind to each other in a tiny corner of this great big, marvelous world.
This said, I do not want to see and experience firsthand, any more suffering than I already have regarding the fear of economic uncertainty that the pandemic has hammered down upon those most poorly equipped to handle it.
The burden is just too great.
The time for change is now.
We all need to be welcomed to the table.
We all need to have our voices heard.
This is what radical love asks of us: to love when it is most difficult to do so, to name things which haven’t been named, to include those who have not been included, to bravely walk into a new tomorrow holding onto the dream that a more beautiful world is a more equitable one for all its beings.
And so, with a tremendous feeling of possibility and hopefulness for the goodness that could be unleashed upon my fellow Islanders and Canadians in general, I share the very good news about Bill’s C-223 and S-233 tabled in the House of Commons and in the Senate by (respectively) MP Leah Gazan and Senator Kim Pate on December 16th, 2021.
What a way to end the year with such extraordinary efforts by these extraordinary women trying to make change for the better a reality! What a way to begin 2022 with a spirit of hopefulness!
This New Year's day 2022, I welcome you to honour the difficulties and the joys presented to you in life by making space for acceptance of them into your heart.
I welcome you to dream the impossible dream of a better tomorrow beginning today.
I wish you the gifts of presence, of feeling included, of being loved and living with wellness and a decent measure of ease. And I wish this for all beings, for the lands, waters and air of this beautiful planet we call home.
Yours in breath,
Jill
With thanks to dear friend David Weale for this post title whose words I stole from an honouring note he wrote about me “…diving under the symptoms and recognizing the deeper, wider sweep of things.”
ps--if you are still with me and feel like tagging along a little further, feel free to read a small sampling of the wide ranging letters featured from a letter writing campaign UBI held in the fall. I had a featured letter in it!