Love dares you to care
For the people on the edge of the night
I love California. I love Los Angeles. It is one of the most beautiful and magical places I have every been. Its history is important to me, and its people. Los Angeles is a city of dreamers and creators. Perhaps those who say disparaging things about it are bitter in their own lives, their own choices; Los Angeles is a city of people who chose to pursue their dreams. It is also a city mostly comprised of people who are not rich and famous, but when we say that in response to the fires, it implies that some people deserve to lose their homes and some do not, and that is not true.
No one deserves this. No one deserves to lose their home to fire an no amount of money protects the soul from the agonies of life and death.
Celebrity culture only exists because we have created it. The very people who are writing hateful things about the Palisades will sit tonight and watch Netflix or read gossip blogs or stream music in their car. How do you hate artists while consuming their art?
Grief is grief, no matter where it’s happening or to whom.
Except to livestream KTLA for coverage of these fires, and to watch Jimmy Carter’s funeral, I have not watched main stream news media since November 5. What I noticed immediately when I gave it up, as breath began to return to my body, was how cruelly we’ve been pitted against one another, division sewn into every manipulative word that’s been thrown on top of us like a heavy blanket, restricting our movement.
It is only through compassion that we will survive, only in the acknowledgement of one another’s humanness that we will continue to exist here, continue to be earthlings.
We are taught that love and empathy are finite resources, but they are not. We are not to measure them out, conserve them, or decide who is deserving of them. To do so is inhumane, and we have been bullied into surrendering our humanness for long enough.
It is the thirteenth day of the new year but I have yet to step into it. I am still floating in uneasy liminal space. I chose a word, which is actually a way of choosing an energy, to guide my year, but at this moment I exist in the diametric opposite of it. Perhaps I am like a balloon that is being expanded and expanded until I pop and can take a new form. Perhaps I am a birdseed, somehow uneaten, that has been buried beneath the ice and snow, forced to wait for the thaw. Perhaps I am just exhausted.
Today is the first full moon of the year, the full moon in cancer, the full wolf moon. I wish I had layers of flowing satin and velvet, magenta, cheetah print to wear as I danced on the cold ground beneath the moon, rubies at my heart, sweet cherry juice dripping down my throat.
I want to feel alive again.
The only way for me to do that is address the needs of my body and the only way to do that, is to listen to my body and respond to whatever it says with love and care. I need to be alive. I need my body to be in working order so that I can care for my immediate people, and my surroundings, and also the world.
I cannot allow my heart to become mean or small. None of us can afford to do that now. We need one another. We need to love unconditionally because we need to be loved unconditionally. It isn’t for the weak. It takes nerves of steel, this work of love.
'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
This moment in time is the moment the seers and astrologers and prophets and psychics and those who can recognize patterns have been pointing to. We are here. It is happening.
But it isn’t happening over there. It isn’t happening to those people. It is happening where we stand, in our hearts, in our own backyards, to each of us and all of us at once.
There is no over there.
We are one body. One earth. One humanity.
And so I am sitting beneath this full moon and tending to my body. I am listening to its pain and noticing where I have refused to love it. I am noticing where I have refused to love the world.
I am holding the world in my belly.
I am prying open the bars that surround my heart.
I am remembering the bright pink bougainvillea blossoms that fell into the driveway of the house on Gardener Avenue in West Hollywood the last time we were there. I am remembering the sunlight of Southern California, how it drapes like golden honey across the skin, how I sat on the balcony and watched the hikers on the trailhead to Runyon Canyon. I am remembering the deer who grazed outside our windows in Laurel Canyon in the city of angels.
I am flowing into the suffering of the world with the understanding that all suffering is mine, just as all joy is mine, because I, like you, am a child of this universe. I am an earthling dancing on the edge of the night, and I understand, there can be no more withholding of love and compassion.
There can only be the pouring out of it.