clean up

Motivation? Get everyone to work and school so I can be alone. Just get through that morning rush. Make sure everyone is fed, dressed appropriately for the weather, has whatever they need to meet the day— signed forms, lunch money, strategy to take into that big meeting. Making sure everyone is ready to meet the day is what I do and when they're all out on time, off to their buses and trains, then I can take a deep breath, the anxiety and pressure drops a bit. It's not that I can relax exactly, I'm not sure I ever relax— what would that feel like? There's never a time when there are no worries, no fears, no pressures. Now even more so, violence and oppression, censure, possible death on all sides. No, it's not relaxation that happens when everyone else is gone, but it's something. Left to my own devices I don't have to attend to others' needs and demands, I can do what I want to do for a time— which may be something or nothing at all. I can never anticipate. I go where my desire takes me. Honoring my own joy, my own gifts. It's what I'd like to be doing all the time, but these crushing debt cycles, bills to pay, obligations to others keep mounting. 

Once everyone was gone, I thought I'd clean up. Really clean. Rinse away anything that got in during the cold of winter. Sweeping out all that's grown stagnant, stale, dusty. Renovating or removing the broken. Getting rid of everything that's expired, rotten. Cleaning the fridge, emptying the medicine cabinets, cleaning between overlooked cracks. I want to get this place clean again. Have a fresh start. I'll never get it clean enough, the place is falling down around us— cracks in the ceiling multiplying, rifts around the windowsills, the plasterwork crumbling, turning to dust. The task feels impossible, but I'll do what I can.

It's not just my mess, it's what's been going on here for ages. We're all cleaning out generational curses. Hundreds of years of silence and lies to cover up what's true. Reprehensible behavior, none of this should have happened, but it did happen and continues to happen until we uncover the worst of it and make it stop. Hold everyone accountable whether they identify as a villain or not. The white man driving his car into the cyclist thought he could get aggressive enough to deflect from the fact that he just ran someone over. All the wide-eyed white women in the car just stayed silent, staring at me like I was the one with the problem for stepping to him. There's a body on the ground because of you. You drove your car into him. I don't care if he says he's fine and he apologizes to you, saying it was his fault— that's an overactive fawn response trying to appease an assailant. 

I'm the one who started the fight. I was the one shouting. I was the one who ran to help. I was the one who stepped to the driver. When he got out of the car looking for a fight, he found me. He really tried to argue with me that he had the right of way and it wasn't his fault. I don't give a shit about right of way. I don't care what the traffic light said. You are in car and he is on a bicycle. Your job is to yield. Your job is to be cautious and careful and look to protect all other beings on this planet, not just your own skin, not just your family in your little car. We take care of each other and all beings because we can. We can, and we have to. I'm not going to argue about it. A body is on the ground and you did it, I watched you do it. Yelling at me isn't going to change what you've done. 

This whole mess, all the suffering and terror being unleashed in all directions, is it just because some people were given too much power and they have no capacity to reckon with their behavior? Don't know what responsibility is. Unconscious of their impacts, uncaring and left completely unaccountable to run amok, destroying lives, the planet, everything. It's no one person. When their leader dies, and soon he will die, they will replace one puppet with another. It's no one person in control of this shitshow, it's the entire system of power-over that's rotten. Even though it often feels like there's little I can do, keeping my little apartment clean, staying as conscious and engaged as I possibly can— it's something. Creating, defending, standing, sitting, laying down, walking. It's all practice for the new world being born from this corruption.