Really Alive

What can we do when the world is too much, too ugly, too violent, unjust, and heartbreaking? When we are drowning in the pain we inflict upon each other and waste we have strewn across the earth? What can we do when our actions seem so small in comparison?

The best antidote I have found to despair is to bear witness to life happening. To feel alive in my body, my breath, my heart beating. To get my hands in the dirt and watch life continue to beat onwards against the current of destruction.

I return again and again to this passage from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine:

”The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

In a world that constantly extracts labor and productivity and data from you, your power lives in what can’t be taken from you: your connection to feeling alive and creating life. In returning to the practices that connect me to a sense of aliveness, I am lifted from my spirals into despair about this world and what it will look like in 10 or 50 or 100 years. Life finds a way.