This Juneteenth marked 14 weeks of living in the corona-nation. It's 15 weeks now and it feels like the extent of losses is becoming unspeakable.
Whether it's Black people killed by the police, or deaths from COVID-19, or the long separation of loved ones far away, or new separations brought on by covid migrations. This time is filled with so much. Health, disparity, sickness/dis-ease, death, grief, mourning, loss. The losses of ceremonies I won't attend, friends I won't see for months or years, babies I won't hold anytime soon. The ripping apart of a nation, sifting of those who are upholding systemic racism and those who are tearing it down and dancing on the ashes. I’m with the dancers, even if our feet are covered with ash.
“In life as in dance: grace glides on blistered feet” - Alice Abrams.
So here we are: gliding, blistered, graceful.
How do we mourn amidst an uprising of hope?
How do we celebrate alongside the mourning?
I don't know. Perhaps this is one of those Rilke moments.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke