By Jamie Corvus
Thank you to those who allowed yourselves to be touched by my last piece of writing. And there were so many of you. Stay with me, if you will.
We owe it to Life to fight for our lives and for each other’s lives, including the more than human and the Earth herself. We owe it to Life to be honest about, and to truly reckon with, what is and what has been. ALL of it. We have no other option. For us (humanity) to ever, ever hope to someday be in a place that is better than here (gestures widely at everything), to ever, ever get to a place that is healed, to get to a place where we center care for each other and for the Earth, to get to a place that isn’t actively trying to harm us all, we have to be honest about where we are and how we got here. Everything is so multilevel fucked and we have so far to go, and we have to start somewhere. We have to start with being in the truth of where we are, right? Only then, can we hope to move forward from a place of integrity.
We need to look at and reckon with things like, unless you are, and I am not, Native American (the original people of this land), or Black (the people who were literally stolen from elsewhere and then trafficked and enslaved here), or Mexican (because, think about it, didn’t the border literally cross them?), then I/we are the immigrants on this land. In my mind, how are we (white people) not the “illegal” immigrants? Because what is the “law” compared to what is moral? We know that there are plenty of things that were/are “legal” but are absolutely immoral, past and present. We (white people) straight up genocide-ed a people, stole this land and also kidnapped and enslaved other humans to do the labor. And then we proceeded to continue to decimate (rape) the Earth. As a country, as a (white) people, we hardly even acknowledge any of this much less attempt to “make things right.” These things don’t lose their relevance, and it all still continues today. This is heartbreaking! Friends, we need to reclaim our humanity and let our hearts break.
We cannot be controlled if we stop disassociating and let ourselves feel each other’s and the Earth’s pain. Can you imagine how every terrible thing would grind to a halt if every human let themselves feel the grief of it all? Therefore, is there a worthier endeavor? There is so much medicine in the heartbreak. There is so much beauty in the courage that it takes to be in the truth of what is and what has been. We cannot expect to know how to move forward, towards Life, without starting here in our minds and in our hearts, in our conversations. Let us commit to melting the ice around our own hearts, and helping others to melt the ice around theirs.