>
“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”
THIS. And this. And this. And that. And that. Oh, and that, too. Fill in the blank as many ways as your heart has been hurt. Swap in everything about the world that you cannot accept. With each and every example, allow yourself to feel the weight of injustice, the pain of exploitation, the ache of alienation. Rage at atrocities commited in your name. Feel furious about avarice. Revulsion at hubris unchecked. Bitterness at the binary thinking that drives everything apart. Feel it all. But resist descent into despair. Despair would be a rational reaction. But it is also immobilizing. Despair will swallow us whole. It will cloak us in layers of shame, indignation, and hopelessness so thick that we won’t be able to feel our way to each other. Make space for all the things you’d rather not feel. Except for despair. Despair is resistable, if you grieve what you can, when you can. Metabolize a bit at a time. But you won’t be able to process it all. So you must let [this] — the thing that you cannot live with, that you cannot ignore, and that you alone cannot change — let this radicalize you. Let it break your heart.
In the face of violence, oppression, apartheid, and extermination, let the pain in. As we endure systems and practices that dishonor our ancestors, diminish our own lives, and pillage future generations, let that pain crack your heart open. Wider. And now, as we face the collapse of one world (the only one we’ve known in this lifetime), let yourself step into that dark fissure in your own heart.
A broken heart is a portal. It can lead us, if we let it, to all the other broken-hearted people who will no longer bear the world as it is. To all those willing to continue showing up with their still-soft hearts — gaping but beating just the same. Maybe stronger. To those who journeyed into the darkness with only their belief in the inexhaustible power and irresistible logic of love. To those who will eventually sit and rest in the darkest depths… and reach out their hand… trusting that anyone else who’s traveled this far also did so to escape, to start again.
What do you dream in the dark? What shapes form and fall? Flutter and firm? How do those visions re-figure as you first sense, then feel, the presence of other broken-hearteds? Can you whisper them? Name them? Speak them into possibility? Sing them into being? A chorus not of mourning but of dawning. A choir for re-worlding. An ancient future song.
Radical Imagination.
