March, March…

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” – Marianne Williamson

While feeling incredibly overwhelmed and powerless yesterday I happened upon this video. I can’t stop watching it. It is literally feeding my soul the power I thought I lost. As I was watching it for the umpteenth time I remembered the quote above that was read in a movie about a little girl who’s community helped her win a spelling bee.

When I was a young mom I had some pretty heavy shit that I was dealing with. Sadly, it of course spilled over into the lives of my children. As my daughter grew older she had her own shit that she was struggling with. To be expected. I can remember a conversation where she said she didn’t want to do it anymore. It being the work. She responded well to visualizations so I used the old, you’ve got to march through the swamp to get to the other side analogy. She heard me and continued her difficult work. I often looked back on those words and wondered if maybe we could have gone around the freaking swamp instead of through it. I bring this up because today, in our country, we are at the edge of the swamp. Well, no, we are actually in it. A huge, all consuming, evil swamp. For years we have tiptoed around the edges. I shamefully include myself in this. Now because we really have no other choice, we have decided to grab each others’ hands and march on through because maybe we do need to cross through the swamp together to get to the other side.

For weeks millions of us have felt like our heads and hearts were going to explode. The cause of such feelings coming from our government’s masterful creation of chaos, division, hate, and fear. Because this is exactly what authoritarian governments do at the beginning. They create chaos, division hatred, and fear. It is what brings a people to its knees and then provides the opportunity for us to scream, “Save us”. Then, as planned, in comes the daddy authoritarian oversight. They save the day, or so they say. Thankfully, we did not scream that. Instead we lifted our fists and voices and we rose up. Finally.

While laying in a MRI machine today it all came tumbling down. My daughter’s possible exposure to Covid, our constant fear of that scenario, another murder of a young Black man by police, my son half way across the world, Siberia hitting 100 degrees, masks, moving, selling, packing, masks…. I couldn’t do it. I literally couldn’t do it. I pressed the panic button and came out of the machine sobbing. Sigh. So I write. Trying like anything to get it all out. I use to run to get it out. That was years ago.

So where do we go from here? We continue to “March, March to my own drum…March march to my own drum…hey hey I’m an army of one….” Keep marching. Keep rising up. Keep speaking up for injustices that our country was founded on and continues to this day. Grab someone’s hand, lift it up, and fucking march.

Mary