Loving Our Future
A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an episode of On Being featuring Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a next-generation marine biologist who spoke deeply about the truths of climate change and also about what it means to live from a place of love and of considering the question ‘what if we get this right?’
As I have gone back and forth in sorting how to live a life that I love, how to allow the life that is meant for me, and how to do all of that in the face of so many layers of destruction and chaos around me, I have thought often of Ayana’s words. She held an insistence on loving what it is that we have to save. An insistence of the importance of imagining what our future might look if we get this right. She held the space of truthtelling of what will potentially be lost (even in our best attempts to get things right), and also a space of wonder and joy that was deeply integrated into the practical realms of a social justice lens. She also held the deeply rooted belief that we have all of the solutions that we need, and that now is a time to simply help people understand where they fit.
It is such a basic notion - to help people understand where they fit. And yet it is something that we are so very far away from culturally. In indigenous cultures, there are cycles, rituals, and celebrations that help those moving into young adulthood to understand where they fit. In some cultures, your name is given to you as an indicator of what your purpose is here in this lifetime. In western civilization, while we may have some rituals or markers in time, most of our depth of connection in these ways has been deeply fragmented. In many ways, that is part of what has brought us to these days of disconnect and destruction. And it is an opportunity ripe for us to dream into.
I see that fragmentation in my own journey, and I also see the opportunity that has been given to me in this. I could mourn that I spent so many years of my adult life allowing the truth of where I fit to be lost from me. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I grieve that it has taken me so many years to fully step into my trans-ness and queerness. Sometimes I grieve that I have allowed my art to take a backseat to other experiences. Sometimes I am downright angry that I was raised to believe that life was so narrow, bland, and binary. But more recently, I am finding myself thankful to have been able to make the shift from what I knew to who I am now so consciously . . . and to be alive in this particular moment of time as so many pieces are shifting around us politically, ecologically, spiritually, and physically. It is an invitation and opportunity to love my future, to love our future . . . and to reclaim where I fit in the space of loving what it is that we have to save.
A month ago I couldn’t tell you why my act of creating and what comes from it was important. I could tell you that I knew at a young age before I could ever verbalize it, that the making and creating of things was where I fit. Now I understand it again. The listening . . . the allowing of things to come through . . . the images and processes and pieces calling to be brought into this world . . . this is where I fit . . . this is what I have to offer in the lens of loving what it is that we have to save.
And while it is something that often isn’t regarded deeply or valued widely in a capitalistic society, the first step in all of this is to dream love into all aspects of my future . . . and then to steadily take steps towards my own life for that to become the reality that is manifest for all.