Trusting our shared foundation of love

Our shared foundation of love is obvious, and everywhere, when we remember to look for it. Sometimes the trick is remembering it's still there or remember to even look. And, sometimes the trick is looking with a heart full of mostly love or gratitude or curiosity, instead of a heart full of fear. Like I've done quite a bit of lately. When this happens, what our most important job is changes. Have you felt that lately too? Known it in your gut or bones or soul or heart– wherever you trust yourself the most?

From my perspective, right now our most important job– for many of us anyway– is to:

1. Prioritize whatever it takes for each of us, personally, to look at the world with a heart full of mostly curiosity or gratitude or love. Ask for or receive help with this, as needed.
2. Prioritize whatever it takes to help us remember to look for our shared foundation of love each day. Ask for or receive help with this, as needed.
3. Allow others to do the same, even though how or where or why they do this is very different from how or where or why we do it. Ask for or receive help with this, too, as needed.
4. Laugh, sing, dance, cry, and/or protest more. Together. Trust that shared foundation of love. Together.
5. Let go of everything that's been getting in our way.

If, like me, you find yourself with a heart full of fear, or forgetting how or where to look for our shared foundation of love now and then, or that we still have a whole lot that we CAN trust, then I believe that you're a person in deep need of an in-person laugh, sing-along, dance party, cry, and/or protest. Surround yourself with at least one someone who will listen, or egg you on to be weirder and wilder, or with others who feel the same. Speak your fears out loud. Howl at the moon if it helps. Move. And hold your fears together. Feel and remember what it feels like to refill with with curiosity or gratitude or love together. And not just see, but to feel our shared foundation of love. And as you feel it, you'll trust again. Realize that we've got this. Or at least that we've got each other, which is no small thing, is it? Repeat as needed.

Pro tip: If you want to really want to get fully re-grounded on our shared foundation of love and trusting humanity again– combining public laughter, singing, dancing, crying, and protesting with large groups of people– ask neighbors about April 5th protests near you or get online and search for "April 5th protests near me." Then go to one this Saturday.

That was the short essay for non-busy folks. The end.

Here's the longer essay for my too-busy friends. We chronically too-busy folks need just one more friend in our lives– the friend that regularly tells us we need to slow down, take time, look around, take a deep breath or two, stop to smell some flowers and touch the earth, and prioritize ourselves again. I come from a long line of too-busy folks. I think I was born to change us. So...

Here are some ideas from our family and community to yours– ideas for returning to noticing and appreciating and building our shared foundation of love. And for trusting ourselves and each other again, in terrible times.

Spend more time talking with, helping, and leaning on friends and family

Here our shared foundation of love is most obvious in my parents: 56 years into marriage, 23 years into holding Mom's Alzheimer's disease together, and they're still smiling at each other with love in their eyes and holding hands even though Mom isn't awake very often anymore. And our foundation of love is also in everyone, and everything, that has held them since they were born back in the 1940s, and in our ancestors before them, and in everyone who holds them today.

Mom lives in a memory care home now, and Dad lives in the retirement community surrounding her memory care home, a block away. To counter all the horrible news stories about how much we all hate each other, how evil we all are, and how the world or at least the U.S. is ending, at 84, Dad now spends a good chunk of his days with his neighbors: cooking and eating meals together, playing cards together, sharing books, fixing all sorts of things for neighbors who aren't handy like he is, going out to eat together now and then, texting friends like a teenager when he's not with them, growing vegetables on his small deck, fishing and crabbing, canning and preserving food, and taking neighbors who can no longer drive to their appointments. Leaning on neighbors, or us, when he needs help.

We try to do the same. It's not quite as easy for us. To pay our bills, we both have to work 5, often 6, days/week. Honestly, we're doing some sort of work 7 days/week now. But we also spend at least 1 day/week with Mom, Dad, and their community, which is ours now too. We take Dad to appointments and shopping trips off island as needed. We bring books to his avid-reader friends. We help him with tech and potential digital scams and the online world while he helps us keep our sense of humor and perspective in the real one. We visit our own friends online and in person for coffee or conversation every chance we get. We've both built small businesses that ensure that we spend more time with an ever-widening circle of local community members, too. We're planning to get even more creative in the coming years– spending even more time in person with those we love. Not easy for a generation without pensions, minimal savings no matter how hard we work, and now facing the loss of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that we spent our entire lives paying in to.

Still, this shift to spend more time building community is our choice, and we will make it, even under a brutal administration now clearly seeking to remove personal choice from all grown adults and elders not just those who disagree with them. They can't take what close-knit communities won't give them, though. So we're doubling down, again, on community now.

Give your emotions their time and due

In times like these, it's natural to doubt and blame ourselves and others. And it's natural to worry and fear for ourselves and others, too. Even to feel rage, helpless, hopeless, and completely alone and depressed or anxious for a while. While these days may be terrifying or horrifying, a small part of me is also thrilled because I've always been an empathic person inclined to cry when I feel another's pain, whether I want to or not. These days, I'm not the odd ball for doing that. More and more people are feeling each other's pain, and crying, breaking with their own cultural training. Crying to help hold another's pain is a leadership skill. Don't let the dipshits fool you. ;-)

Three things have really helped us here with giving our emotions their time and due:

1) Being aware that manipulating us into feeling outrage, blame, doubt, helplessness, hopelessness, depressed, anxious, and completely alone– and screaming at neighbors and strangers and family members who we can reach instead of billionaires we can't quite reach– is the GOAL of bad actor billionaires and con men out to steal more of our money. Billionaires use their media empires, including social media, fake accounts, bot farms, and AI to spread these strong negative feelings, because people focused on love and loving each other, and loving their neighbors, and loving strangers, aren't so easily fooled.

2) Allowing ourselves to fully notice, feel, name out loud, and sit with our feelings as they arise. Practicing this, again and again. Until we get so good at it that we can let others do the same without feeling threatened.

3) Returning to comforting creations, or creating ourselves, when humanity feels unbearable. That's leaning on music we love, food we love, books we love, movies and TV shows we love, online writers and creators we love of all ages, attending live theater again, and, for me, writing again, for Daniel, doing more photography. Not to escape. To fortify ourselves and put our individual fears into perspective within the collective generosity and unbelievable beauty of humanity.

Here, we have to drop a bit of ancestral and main-stream cultural baggage– ways of being that were once needed but that aren't needed anymore. We don't have to hide or stop feeling everything we're feeling. We do have to shift away from feeling shame or guilt simply for being human, just for feeling our feelings at all, or for feeling them for longer than we'd like or were taught was acceptable.

Time to shift. Humanity herself is co-inventing a new electric slide.

And, here we're sharing our emotions with loved ones more and processing them together more, so we don't have to face them as alone. A real game-changer here has been sharing feelings across generations and cultures, with people of different ages and different backgrounds than our own. Those of us content with judging and screaming at strangers online– which more often than not now appear to be fake accounts there to provoke rage or fear, especially on social media– are trying to hold difficult emotions alone. Stop it, Lori. Just stop. Share those feelings with people who actually know and love you or at least with human faces you can actually see or feel enough to know that it's real people, not AI/bots/paid bad actors, you're screaming at. Human beings have discussions out of which everyone walks away having learned or unlearned at least a little something new. We rock. Bots and fake accounts exist to ramp up rage and other strong emotions that keep us engaged enough to keep buying products while doing little to nothing else, or to scare us into not voicing our opinions at all.

Emotions arise for a reason. They are a superpower of earthlings, not a weakness. Sit with them. Listen to what they have to say. Listen some more. Learn about your gifts as a member of humanity and a native of planet earth.

Embrace grief herself as a trusted friend

Most of us are grieving for our country, and/or our neighboring countries, and/or for our planet as a whole now. Humanity almost as a whole is now grieving that a handful of clearly abused, cruel, and chronically abusing, unbelievably wealthy con men– and their paid lackies– can simply spread lies about humanity as a whole with their media and social media empires and buy elected officials and even whole governments now. Causing suffering to increase for millions and the deaths of far too many. And, what actually feels worse most days, is how many friends and family members appear to actually believe these con men above their own intuition and their own emotions and their own common sense and their own reason and above their own friends and family, too.

That's heartbreaking. That's big grief to hold. Huge.

Because we've held ongoing personal grief for so long here, we do our best not to have expectations of others holding ongoing big grief. Grief this big is far larger than us. We can barely hold it ourselves. It would be foolish to judge others holding grief this big.

If you've lost a friend or family member that you couldn't imagine ever living without, then you know what we know here: painful and difficult feelings can be expected, embraced, and even relatively easily forgiven in the deeply grieving. Are we ready to forgive the deeply grieving, including ourselves? Are we ready to allow ourselves and others to just grieve out loud for a while? Let people scream into the void of social media for a while without assuming they're out to hurt us? Just because a handful of abused/abusing/cruel wealthy men want to con and hurt all of us doesn't mean our neighbors do.

We're all hurting now. All grieving now. Some of us are deeply grieving for the first time. Some of us are grieving beneath terrible shame and guilt about the part we played in bringing our family or community or country to this point. Some of us have no idea how to hold grief. Some of us come from people who demonstrated that visibly or publicly grieving isn't acceptable at all, so in the past we've been forced to hide or express other emotions instead—such as attacking and rage-blaming people for small things or silently fuming and hiding emotions and allowing emotions intended to come, be shared, and then go to help us instead fester into far stickier emotions, such as contempt and disgust and chronic despair, that are hard to shake and can trap and swamp us when we don't get help. Swamp families, and even swamp countries when we refuse to acknowledge and hold our grief together. A lot of us distract ourselves, or become addicts, or lash out about small things and hurt others instead of acknowledging the deep sorrow and pain and fear that come from losing something or someone far more real and meaningful to us.

We are all grieving now, in all the moments when we can clearly see this and face it together and also in the moments we can't or won't face it at all. Grief is with us. As the daughter of a woman who is living with/has lived with Younger Onset Alzheimer's for 23 years now, in a family that has lost many members to the disease, and as a 54-year-old woman in a family where Alzheimer's comes to many of us in our early to mid 50s, believe me when I say we understand grief as a constant companion and trusted friend here. We know her when we see her. She's everywhere now. And. She's not the enemy.

I wrote this poem about my Mom and I, 10 years ago. I carry only poems as proof, because they're all the proof we need.

I Break My Heart Each Morning

I break my heart each morning
so there is room for her

her memory and story
her history inside of me

disease that slowly separates
her away from her

beyond disease
a slow release
of precious self to daughters.

Mom
we broke ourselves each morning
let our hearts be wounds
now find those hearts
a gentle gauze
wound around the world.

I suspect this poem is saying that we don't have to fear grief. We can share it. Create with it. Move with it. Protest with it. Shatter expectations with it. Drop stale ways of being with it. Laugh with it. Re-invent and re-imagine with it. Risk your heart to become a gentle gauze wound around the world. It may feel like a brave move in the beginning. Eventually, moving with grief becomes second nature. All elders with sparkling, smiling eyes and gentle, generous ways know this. Most don't have to speak about it at all. I do. The forest here asked me to.

Risk your heart to become a gentle gauze wound around the world.

Religious people often speak of grace. Some people think of grace as the presence of God or as actions or movements in alignment with beauty or what God would want. I experience grace as a natural ability to love every living being by simply acknowledging that grief is our shared companion in this lifetime, no matter where we are, who we're with, or what species we are. We have grief in common.

If grieving for your land and country and people and neighbors and/or the whole planet is new to you, remember this. You're not alone. Many are brand new to this too. And, many of your neighbors have been grieving all of this– largely unnoticed by you and/or your people– for many years or many generations. There are ancestors and people and even forests grieving and praying and fighting on your behalf right now. You are not alone in your grief. You and your big human heart are expanding to hold the experiences and pain of more neighbors now, which hurts and also comes with feeling more love, too, when we allow it to. Invite grief in and sit with her to feel more love.

The Christian school I attended as a child taught us to "be in the world, not of the world." Sorry, Sioux Falls Christian, that's simply not enough love for me. For us. It's not even close.

Here we say this– Don't let this world break your heart: break your heart wide open for the world you love.

A lot of us are doing that right now. Feeling both more wonderful and more terrible are to be expected here. The main difference between today, and last year, is that far fewer of us are trying to hold big grief alone now. Globally. That is making a difference everywhere, even if you can't feel it yet.

I experience grace as a natural human ability to love every living being by simply acknowledging that grief is our shared companion in this lifetime, no matter who we are, where we are, or who we're with. We have grief in common.

Holding grief alone for too long can make you feel harder, smaller, more petty, more compact, and walked on– like concrete. Some wise cultures say that we hold grief in our lungs, which makes sense to me. Holding grief alone makes it hard to breathe. When was the last time you took a very deep breath in and let a very deep breath out? Holding grief together, with others who feel grief too, can make you feel softer, more fluid, larger than you previously imagined, more welcoming, and expansive– like the blossoming mossy earth waking up in springtime. We breathe life into each other. In the battle between concrete and the living earth, the earth always wins eventually. She grows within the cracks, around the edges, and even surrounds and reclaims concrete as her own eventually.

Here we say this– Don't let this world break your heart: break your heart wide open for the world you love.

Life wins. Love wins. Even when we lose. Shared grief helps us hold on to that innate awareness and wisdom when we're far too sad, angry, scared, or outraged to remember on our own.

Let your fear-based questions surface, and share them with someone

When we're hurting and grieving, it's natural to slow down and natural to fall into fear-based questions that slow us way down.

Questions such as...

How did this happen? How did we let this happen? How did we allow the most wounded, abused, disconnected, and abusive con men rise to power? How did we let our neighbors trust them both more than they trust themselves and more than they trust us? Why didn't we stop this sooner? How did we allow these clear con men and chronic abusers and liars to break so many laws before and never be held accountable? And now, are we just going to allow them to rewrite history, erase the contributions of others, and break all promises to our country's neighbors and friends and allies and citizens and visitors here? How are we allowing them even a moment to reimagine our beloved checks and balances– a shining star in an always-flawed-and-changing government– into brutal authoritarian rule and dictatorship? Align with dictators globally? How are we allowing them to terrify and kidnap off the street or deport good families and children– sending them off to for-profit prisons in other states and to countries where they've never even been, or to places where they weren't safe to begin with which is why they came here? How are we standing for the mass firing of Americans and veterans and the mass selling-off of public lands once held and loved by all of us and write orders to clearcut hundreds of thousands of acres our beloved public forest land? How are we just sitting here stunned by how rapidly and cruelly they now seek to strip away rights and attempt to sink millions of Americans into full-blown poverty and chaos and foolishness by eliminating our already-paid-for-by-us social security, Medicare, Medicaid, affordable care act, education system, social and human services, and more– all at once?

We're hold a lot of fear now. I could rattle off 500 fear-based questions like that– off the top of my head today. Aren't you glad I'm not that long winded? ;-)

Fear-centered questions slow us down. They often do so by pulling us in circles and in unexpected or painful or "wrong" directions. Although they can be scary and uncomfortable and make us dizzy or almost catatonic with worry, there's no need to fear the questions that arise in you to slow you down– especially not when you're surrounded by people who love you and/or love the land and/or who love their neighbors fiercely enough to fight for and with them even though they have vastly different ways of showing it. Elected representatives working for a handful of thieving billionaires and con men instead of all of us who elected them– all across the U.S. right now– are getting a heaping helping and a crash course in this now.

Slow down and listen. Share those fears, listen more closely together, and follow them back to their source. Caring about origin stores is a sign you're shifting in the right direction. Listening to our fears together is important because fear-based questions are often not showing us what we think they are as individuals. They exist to re-connect us to each other and to connect us to larger perspectives. As individuals, we can hide from the truth and we can believe that there's only one truth in a world not bound by our individual imaginations. That's why we need friends and community. Fear-based questions often require a variety of participants, or at least two fully listening beings, to be fully heard and understood to their source. Their source, too, is love.

Notice when the first love-centered question arises

Love-centered questions get us moving again: this time, in directions we actually want to be going in. I noticed this week that I've apparently finally shared enough of my fears and my family's fears and community's fears out loud across the past years and months. How do I know this? Because this week, instead of focusing on the giant circus of non-stop destruction, dread, and fear mongering that the U.S. federal government has become, I found myself laughing and exchanging jokes with friends again. Found myself shifting into my most playful self, even here. And I found myself wondering this, instead:

What were we doing that was so bloody important that we didn't fully see this billionaires-trying-to-own-the-entire-U.S.-government-instantly-via-full-dictatorship-and-extreme-globe-wide-cruelty coup coming?!

And there. Right there. That's the question that stopped my own fears in their tracks. This question still sounds a bit angry, yes, because I still hold anger. Why did we ever think that love and anger were disconnected? They are partners in life and crime! We move with our anger now, like Mark Ruffalo/Eric Bana/the Hulk. ;-) And like all menopausal and post-menopausal women are wise enough to do, and most of humanity does, now, too. And, I can really feel the love taking the lead in this question. This question was actually the first one that moved me all the way back to my people's love-centered self, not just my own. It reminded me of a larger present, a larger reality, that I'd been ignoring out of abused-and-abusing-hated-billionaire-style fear. Fear that we've all been asked to hold. Fear that we can hold, to help, and that we can also set down at will, also to help.

In my love-centered questions, my "we" includes humanity as a whole now. My we is bigger than these cruel men. Bigger than this country. My we is even bigger than humanity as a whole. My we is not about left vs right. Or young vs old. Or smart and educated not duped vs dumb and uneducated and clearly duped. Or rural vs city citizens. Or rich country vs poor country. Men vs women and gender fluid folks. Or citizens vs immigrants and refugees. My we isn't even about community-centered people vs isolated people. Even most of us who saw this coming didn't anticipate the speed and brutality paired with stunning incompetence, endangerment of all life on earth, and a persistent and wildly baseless arrogance, and dementia and/or drug-fog hazy state of those attempting to buy their way into being some sort of cabal of petty kings of the world. Men who don't even know the basics of math or using the Signal app let alone how the U.S. government or global economics work. These men don't know what love-centered humanity can do.

Why didn't I fully see this coming? Have you asked yourself that question yet?

Drop all imposter syndrome now, all shame and guilt, and instead focus and own how amazing you are. Insert your own answer– based in love– here. Or read mine.

I didn't fully see this coming because...

I was spending ample time with and caregiving for elder parents, one of whom has Alzheimer's disease. I was supporting my community, friends, and family by creating local-plant-infused herbal offerings, such as joint pain salve and itchy skin salve and sore muscle rub and grief support lotion bars and ferry traffic tension balm and beautiful boundaries balm. I was supporting my community by listening to friends and helping make local makers markets more fun, popular, and successful, keeping more local money in the hands of local creative people, mostly young people. I was supporting the land I love by listening to it directly, like my ancestors did, and by listening to those who know the land here better than I do and by learning to work with the land and forest and plants, gently, not separate from or above them. I was supporting my sister navigating full time motherhood and her other extremely important work for all kids and people in her state. I was supporting my young niece in feeling utterly surrounded by love as she grows up in a world still stunningly cruel to women. I was supporting my partner in navigating multiple health challenges and running his small business too. I was taking care of our dogs and cats and the land here. I was hosting makers markets and fundraising for local non-profits. And sending our extended family and friends love and photos from my folks who can't reach out, visit, and share the way they once did. I was listening to and learning from people around the world who have different backgrounds from ours, yet remarkably similar hearts. In the past 18 months, I've also been working with Palestinian artisans and fundraising for families experiencing mass genocide– people dying cruelly and in shocking numbers thanks in part to my own government's love of weapons manufacturing, spreading blame and fear, and hating on entire random categories of people we don't know and won't even make the time to better understand or help, preferring the hard-hearted efficiency of blowing 160,000 children, elders, and civilians to pieces.

What were we doing that was so bloody important that we didn't fully see this billionaires-trying-to-own-the-entire-government-instantly-via-dictatorship coup coming?!

Why didn't I fully see it coming? Because I was doing my part to build our shared foundation of love. Taking steps toward making this world more welcoming and safer and this country a more perfect (aka, less harsh, threatening, clueless, annoying, racist, fear-based, violence-spreading, spinning-in-pointless-painful-circles) union.

And so were you. You were doing your part too! I know this because totally lost, self-centered assholes out to destroy all or most of humanity as they gain unimaginable wealth have zero interest in reading me. ;-)

We were doing our part.

The moment you take one full, solid, conscious step back in the direction love– with your doubt, blame, rage, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, aloneness, or grief moving with you, now, instead of stopping you and silencing you– you will find your own answer to this question. Like Wisconsin voters just demonstrated this week. ;-)

What were we doing that was so important that we didn't fully see this coming?

I know my own answer to this.

We were loving.

We were loving.

We were building our part of this shared foundation of love. We were working on ourselves every step of the way and especially when we got things wrong and assumed the worst of others without hearing the full story first and we needed to apologize, and shift our language when we more fully understood, and course correct. Humans need to do this again and again, that's part of life's package deal. But we can do this with love at our center, to lessen suffering, every single time too. We know that. We take responsibility for that.

We were learning to fully trust ourselves and our neighbors. All of this is work that cannot possibly be fully forgotten, or wasted, or a waste of time. No matter what happens next. This work is woven into the fabric of humanity now. It's in our DNA. Yep, even in most white folks in the U.S. now, finally, too.

We've been building our shared foundation of love. Now is the time to trust it.

Trust like you've never trusted before.

Trust yourself. Trust your friends. Trust your neighbors. Trust laughter and follow all urges to play. Trust librarians and educators doing their best. Trust gardeners and farmers and food preservers and poets and musicians and all those who hold on to old wisdom with their hearts.

Trust trees and soil and flowers and herbs. Trust healers that help. Trust generous neighbors and smiling baristas. Trust that the pain and suffering that people are feeling is real, even when we're not spot-on about the source. Trust your community in other states and countries around the world. Trust activists who've been doing this longer than you and your people.

Trust imperfect people who inevitably use the wrong language but who don't intend to cause harm. Trust people who listen, learn, and apologize. Trust that you are strong enough to hold the pain and feedback of others, and to grow as friends, even when you don't get everything right. Because you won't. Nobody gets it all right.

Trust cross-generational and cross-cultural sharing and wisdom. Trust our country's neighbors. Trust our interconnectedness. Trust historians and in-depth reporters and political cartoonists who work for themselves instead of holding their tongues and turning our stomachs when working for billionaires. Trust, trust, trust.

Ask for help whenever you believe you can't trust something or someone. Ask, ask, ask. Spread trust wherever and however and whenever you can. Asking for help is spreading trust, too. Is leadership, too. Is being fully human.

We must all do now what the billionaires and the always-angry-even-when-"winning" men still blindly spreading their own fears and pain around so clearly cannot do. We must be the role models for ourselves and each other that they cannot possibly be.

It's time to stand on our shared foundation of love, listen to each other, trust each other, and face this head on. Together, this time, almost every step of the way.

What's crumbling now is not our shared foundation of love. Life herself is not crumbling now. What's crumbling now is everything within us that's been getting in her, and in our, way.