At 7 am, I received a text asking what I would die for and what I would live for
The text, from a dear one who has asked to remain anonymous, which I now invite you to also receive:
“This morning I am reminded of [the show’s] central theme: what are you willing to put your life on the line for, willing to die for? Science, philosophy, fame, money, religion, fear, family? Can you live in a world without one of these things? Do you even want to live in a world without one of these things? Or being forced to live with a bastardized version of it knowing there is a deeper truth?
Conversely, what is something that you can dedicate the rest of your life to and for what reason? Everyone must die, but can you live a long (or short) life for a cause that someone else might *throw their life away for*? A cause they might perish opposing to their final breath? Can you pursue one lifelong goal only out of hatred, love, fear, chasing away a ghost of the past, fame, salvation, the morning sun?
Or are you merely uninteresting, no better than cattle
I’m reminded of these questions now, living during the genocide, an active Trump Fascist state, a country where so many can have so little empathy for others. Am I cattle because I haven’t gone further than using my words in trying to oppose what is happening, in putting my health, life, body on the line for anything ever?”
Inhale and exhale.
How would you answer this question? Maybe take a second and jot down your own thoughts in your notes app / nearby pen & paper.
Here’s where I went:
“I appreciate the poetry of your writing, of the way this ancient question manifests through the instrument of your mind uniquely and succinctly. Did you feel that there was an answer that rose (or roared) up in you in your writing this?
It is vital, what you are questioning, in that it asks whether we can and to what we would commit living toward and for—while others are dying for that purpose, that core nucleus in the center of their being that governs their trajectory through all passageways. In the center of your question is the awareness of the potentiality and preciousness of life. Let me first dispel any notion that you are “like cattle.” Simply by thinking for yourself critically, speaking your truth, and interrogating the terrain of your own soul, this designation falls away. (let’s also just leave the cows out of this.)
Language is so powerful a tool that they, not the cows but the corrupt, desperately want people to feel so powerless as to forego it. Please do not discount its power. There’s an Audre Lorde essay called “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” which since undergrad I have remain entranced with and although I am going to make my own attempt at your question, I can’t move forward without offering a few quotations:
“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?…I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you…the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger…And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.”
My answer to your question connects with the truths we believe and know beyond understanding, with—love, in the purest sense of the word, its inseparability from truth, as in true wisdom. Love, in its essence, is of a higher consciousness. A higher consciousness that is also deep in our bones, rippling wisdom of the soul. This truth is the undercurrent of oneness that humankind has largely forgotten and yet still retains the capacity for remembrance. To be a beacon of these two things, love and truth in congruence, is to act as a human lighthouse (amongst many others) that both remains firmly rooted on the land of liberation (founded in discovering inner peace and self-knowledge) while simultaneously stretching out, making contact with those in and across the water.
To discover the self, is to experience total spaciousness, everything and nothing coexisting at once—but to live the purpose of the self is to recognize this shared identity with others. The responsibility to connect with and alleviate the suffering of our loved ones, both closets to us and those who span the globe, rises in this awareness. Maybe this will look like conversations or maybe it will look like community action. Empathy is indeed still a rare commodity, but I’d like to think empathy is akin to a seed within others awaiting sunlight and nourishment. Thich Nhaht Hanh taught that we must choose to nourish the seeds we want to grow within us. When it comes to empathy, I believe that there are so many people in need of being heard in order for them to be able to hear the cries of others. It is difficult for most humans to give what they have not received for themselves.
To love you, and my other dear ones, only renews my commitment toward the cultivation of a better tomorrow. What is that unseen element on the periodic table that electrifies the mind with hope? If we are so lucky to know love, then we see the world’s children as our own. The child who is the source of all dreams—this innocent, sacred, most vulnerable group of people. We live in a world that often calls them, in no uncertain terms, less than human. It regularly does not afford them justice, and it is unacceptable.
When asking what we live for~ I would also offer the morning sun as another piece of this answer, in a literal and metaphorical sense. To be human includes our consciousness of our being animals, hardly different than any others, hardly different from plants (which are more sentient than previously understood.) To our knowledge, the ego is the difference and the disruptor. Rising to greet the day, to live life fully with presence and purpose, to accept the gift of sunlight which powers this earth, is inherently intertwined with our purpose as creatures on this planet. This is a wisdom I learned first from Indigenous writers and then began to experience in my own body.
And since I’m already here, I view the moon as our teacher—which is why its phases are etched on my ribs: how to transform, how to shine at all degrees, how to trust that when there is total darkness that the fullness of light will return again. Change is continuous; it is the only thing we can count on.
The sun and the moon, endless in the metaphor they offer us. Love as the sun, the creative source from which all life springs forth from, and which is too powerful for us in its most raw sense to even touch. Truth as the moon, which is solidity, reflecting back the light of love, and which also has the ability to seemingly be subjective in its changing state, but is at all times, the unequivocal force residing even in the darkness.
And as I write this, I am wholly aware of my being a mere ant on this floating rock, a grain of sand writing from a perspective lodged squarely inside our own solar system and of all that exists outside that organization, and I humbly accept that this is the state and matter with which I have to grapple with in a language that has been quite historically problematic while remaining awestruck by the infinitude that exists outside the paradigms that allow me to behave with some modicum of order amidst chaos.
More order would be nice.
If you had texted me this question last Friday, what would I dedicate my life to? I would have said to the liberation of moon bears which, I had just seen a video of being freed from decades long entrapment in Vietnam, and I began to cry in public. Later, I read an essay my friend wrote about Tilikum and how orcas are meant to swim 40-140 miles a day. That night, my little sister *spontaneously* brought up this same subject, and we lamented the fish of all sizes trapped in aquariums. No matter what, they know they are not in the sea, can sense that this is not the energy of the ocean. In the state I live in, there are the most children in cages, given dirty water and no education. And I have asked myself many times: what am I doing inside my house?
The complete answer to your question lives inside these impulses—the belief in liberation. Love and truth are liberators. They free the mind. The free mind looks upon the earth and sees all that is not free with clear eyes. All sentient creatures on this planet, as well as the rivers, forests, the oceans, which are occluded with human debris, are to be liberated. This takes place on a cellular level, as in we each are cells in one entity that cannot independently take on the destruction that precedes our existence and yet we each hold a universe within ourselves, one that may have immensely positive ripple effects according to how we cultivate it.
And another note on the latter half of your question: there are many people who cannot go to protests, who cannot put their bodies on the line. This doesn’t make them cattle. It is a right, a privilege, a responsibility, and a risk all at once. You also can’t go to everything and you’re not supposed to; this movement is anti-capitalist and thus resists the burnout of hustle culture—it takes everybody to make this wide a tide turn. (Click for a dose of self-care permission from TN Representative Justin Pearson.) The revolution is not exclusively protest in the streets. It’s never been achieved that way. Protesting is only a small piece of this puzzle; blowing bubbles on the lawn of the capitol is nothing without actually following up, applying pressure, e-mailing reps, etc.) It’s a multi-prong approach. It happens through education, mobilization, organization, mutual aid, policy change, boycotting, and voting. Using your voice. This is what systemic change will take. To be hard on yourself benefits no one and robs you of the feeling of possibility. (A sentence that is also a reminder to myself. Doubt, guilt, worry are healthy to acknowledge, not to carry.) There is nothing greater than the power of belief. As insane as it feels sometimes, we must remember creativity, belief, and imagination are tools, not childhood toys.
Set small actionable goals. Are there local groups doing something you believe actually makes a difference? You know that sometimes it’s as small (and as large) as just showing up as an audience member. Sometimes it is showing up late to an anti-fascism protest with no sign and just standing on the side of the road next to someone holding the sign. Holding up your fingers in a peace sign. Sometimes it’s going to city hall and speaking up there. There are ways to make a difference that are highly accessible. Language matters. They want people to feel powerless because as soon as everyone realizes how powerful they each individually are, and that it was never more complicated than us versus them, they’re fucked. For years, I’ve thought of this as one of many of the great ironies of a country that calls itself US yet does not recognize itself as an us in the mirror. And in truth, it doesn’t, but maybe soon it can.
I told my littlest sister that the horrors we are seeing, that she is witnessing on a screen in the palm of her tiny, well-manicured hand, are indeed horrific, but as you very well know, you cannot treat an illness that you cannot cannot see nor name. That at the very least, the masses are now seeing where there needs to be excising / medicating / healing / de-conditioning / unlearning / repairing / revolutionizing. Do we wish it had come sooner? Were there people calling for this change for years? Yes and yes. We lament, and then, we walk forward. There is no other direction against these backwards folks.
Because at the exact same time that this all feels so raw and new and in many ways it is, in other ways it is not. We are not without at least some blueprint for that forward movement. It is the spiral, this I, of humanity, has been seeking to solve itself, an eye in need of seeing itself, time and time again, it is the act of history repeating itself. I will not feign to have all the answers, but I do know spirals move both inward and outward. They move toward center, toward unification—of being a singular, one, united “I” which will also see itself as a continuous fabric with the planet and all that is beyond it. That outward motion an encompassing spiral of evolution.
(what if awakening were realizing we are a sunflower whose center mirrors a heart)
Moving on from this Fibonacci tangent—I would also like to add a quote by the late great poet Andrea Gibson, “everything you are feeling, call it love.” These human responses, whether they be rage, dismay, sorrow, or hope are all indications of a healthy humanity (which the world clearly needs) and are coming from the same internal sun, rising up again and again, pulling toward this moon-truth for a more just, more healthy, more beautiful, more free world. The world as it should be.
I would be curious to know your answers to your own questions, whether they are fully formed or amorphous or unknown to you still. Thank you for asking them and for holding space for my responses.”
if you’ve read this far, that goes for you too. Thank you also for holding space for my humble attempts at responding to these important questions. what answers rise up in you? what questions are propelling you in your daily life? lmk where you’re at in all this. we need each other, every step forward.
