Another Word for Cosmic Balance
An Equinox Prayer for Finding Joy After We've Been Knocked Down
On the streets of Napoli, with my love.
I'm baaaaack...
Hello, my people. It's been a while.
I haven't published a blog since the re-election of Donald Trump. How ya doing out there? 🫂
As I've written about previously, my partner and I decided to travel in Europe, while working remotely, from May 2024-2025. We'd just hit the halfway mark when the 2024 election results came in. It was powerfully destabilizing. Like getting knocked out in the proverbial boxing ring of life. Not my favorite metaphor, granted, but one I felt viscerally. We spent the late fall and winter in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland - the lands of some of my ancestral peoples - and there we wept and hiked and rested and had long conversations by the fire about it all.
A cold and contemplative walk in Peebles, Scotland.
By February, we moved on to Italy for our final 3 months abroad - to the lands of some of my partner's peoples - and celebrated his 50th birthday in Rome. It was epic, and very apropos. Us, enjoying our lives with friends who visited for the occasion, while L.A. burned and the US buckled up for a second round of this governmental nastiness. So much dissonance between what we were feeling - in love with the beauty of Italy which includes the spoils of centuries of empire - alongside our sorrow for what was happening back home. Bittersweet.
Looking back on it now, I see that we were filling our cups for the days ahead. And boy am I ever glad we did.
We returned in May to a fast succession of hard things unfolding in the lives of almost everyone we love, including my sister and niece's apartment burning down, and a long search for affordable housing for my elderly mother, amongst many other painful stories I won't detail here. Maybe you can relate?
Street Art in Bologna, Italy.
Part of what has gotten me through these days of rough return is re-listening to one of my favorite episodes of The Emerald Podcast: Oh Justice. In it, Joshua Michael Schrei takes us on a mythic journey about how justice has been understood by many indigenous people as a manifestation of cosmic flows and the ever-balancing movements of nature. This perspective helps me lean into what I know in my body. That I must balance the horrors I see/feel/experience every day with reveling in the joys of life on this complicated and gorgeous planet.
Opportunities abound.
Walking across the border with friends.
This weekend, I crossed the US/Mexico border on foot for the first time, and whoa, what a time for it. I was attending a workshop with a community of peer counselors that I've been a part of for over 23 years. We gathered to listen to each other, and to heal from the effects of oppression in our lives. I got to trade listening time with a Mexican woman who only spoke Spanish, while I only speak English, and a third woman translated for us.
I cannot express how powerful it was to be able to look into the eyes of a total stranger, without a shared language, from countries whose governments are on seriously contentious terms, and to be able to connect so deeply and lovingly. As one of the leaders of the workshop asked us later, "With what we know how to do with one another, who can stop us?" Let me tell you, I cried. Cried and cried.
Monument in Serino, Italy, dedicated to all who had to emigrate, like my honey’s people.
I suppose what I mean to tell you is that I am back, in the flesh, with you stateside, and continuing to pick myself up off the floor of that boxing ring. That I know a bit about how to hang onto one another so we can keep going somewhere new as we pass through these crumbling times. That I see your suffering, but I also see how magnificent you are. That I'm with you.
Here's hoping that we can connect soon, whether through the group I'm leading this fall, or in some other way. Feel free to reply and tell me how you are, and how I can best support you and what you're working on. Autumnal blessings, dear ones. May you find your balance.
With love,
Michelle
