Today, for hours, I’ve sung Kaddish with millions. They appeared during a conversation with a friend’s great-grandfather this morning and were formally introduced by an Old Siksika.
They’ve come before; from different countries and cultures, showed up in suburban backyards, asking for not just release but the transformation of the patterns that lead to the repeating of history.
When the door opened to walk through the valley of the shadow of death associated with the horrors of Auschwitz this morning, I chose to walk through, directly into the collective grief, rage, lostness, loss & fear, wounds; disconnection from self, place, home, space, heart and Other. I accepted the invitation to see grandfathers watch babies bashed, feel the numbness created by being surrounded corpses that could not be cared for, to know that one death was meant to fell many–to bring them not to their knees in surrender but to eradicate their connection to all things.
Giving the task to grieve in ways that are beyond the capacity of memorials and museums, I opened my own Way to dance the requiem of millions whose voices were not as quashed as some would wish. The collective and individual internalization of hidden wounds was given unction & space for loving and living expression of grace.
The pattern was shown me this morning was one of parallel lines that were/are in the process of crossing again. A graphic of history repeating itself through the collective threads of consciousness of control and action that brought genocides into existence and threatens their replication.
I opened my way and allowed breath & love to fill the spaces between those lines and this time with forgiveness, compassion, mercy, grace, strength, hope, innocence and faith.
Faith, neither in diety or dogma, but in a knowing that the one standing by me and in front of me is my brother and myself and as valuable as any god; not an object to be spit upon and an objective to conquer & control.
We each stand at the precipice–across the globe–where we can choose to repeat history by conscious action or quiet complicity, or, we can choose to honor the past and those lost in it & taken by it, choosing differently by honoring humanity and the holy.
The ecstatic, dynamic nature of our being allows us the opportunity to move through recognition and release of great and historic pain onto the path for grace where we are now.
Today I grieved for masses and danced Mass for millions. We moved and cried and prayed in creation of space for salvation, redemption, forgiveness, health, new direction & voice.
Choose now, for yourself, how you might do the same. Choose when you click ‘like’, share hate or gossip or fear; choose when sarcasm gives you the easy way out, choose how you join the collective consciousness of fearing other, how you create possession for something for which there is no ownership, and how you choose to engage with the rest of the world.
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