Despite the hours of repetitive liturgy that is at the heart of Jewish worship, I am not much for formal prayer. This is true for three reasons: I don’t believe in the God to whom these prayers are addressed; 2) I find the words of the prayers parochial, patriarchal, and largely irrelevant to my life; and 3) I find reading aloud in community boring: no matter how beautiful the words may be, reading them in unison (or worse responsively) robs them of all value. Given this, it should be no surprise that I rarely attend formal Jewish worship services. This was true before Covid-19 and is all the more true when services are conducted via Zoom where you can see that the vast majority of people on–line are not paying any attention at all.

While witnessing unprecedented sickness, social unrest and grief, I’ve also seen a great deal of generosity, heroic acts of compassion and whole hearted sharing that perhaps would not have happened had times been milder. I always say that there are two sides to every coin. We do ourselves a disservice by only focusing on the negatives of this year because we deny ourselves deeper insight about experiences that stretched and groomed us for the better.

One lesson I’ve learned is how even the briefest of mindfulness practices can provide needed self-care in those moments when we’re feeling activated by the various stressors that we all find ourselves facing. Taking as little as five to ten minutes, to deepen the breath as we just practiced, to stretch, to briefly scan our bodies with the simple intention to soften, let go, and release… all of these mindful practices can make a surprisingly huge difference in reducing our stress.

Mercy’s bridge rests on the solid foundations of human evolutionary resilience, brain neuroplasticity, and spiritual awakening. Our species’ wiring for compassion and the desire to eliminate our racialized suffering provide the real potential for our social imagination to grow.

In July, I visited Minidoka National Historic Site, a windswept, barren, sage-strewn high desert area in south central Idaho. My friend and I were the only people on the self-guided tour, and as we progressed, the camp came to life in our imaginations. Children swam in the small pool created from a canal/irrigation ditch, men and women hauled baskets of potatoes from adjacent fields to store in an underground building (built by them), boys practiced baseball on a large field and rubbed the dust out of their eyes, women arranged home-grown flowers or painted.

Like blood cells bringing oxygen throughout the body (and shuttling away the carbon dioxide waste product), making deep contact in my journal clears out the residue from my past experiences and activities, and it offers me something pure and clean and renewing in its place. Not energy per se, but something invisible that allows me to call up energy in the moments ahead when I'll need it.

As a Latinx, immigrant, non-black person of color, mother, consultant, life coach, and activist, this work is essential for me, my people and the world. mindfulness and compassion practices are the tools that allow me to take active action to bring justice, to decolonize my mind and body, to be an ally and defend black lives, and to aim to abolish all systems of oppression.

I think that many of us are feeling both types of ambiguous loss during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Physically our worlds have changed little. Most of us live in same our homes. Office and school buildings, shopping malls, museums, etc. are physically the same, but vacant and void of human interaction. There is no emotional presence. Our lives are physically similar, but emotionally absent. Graduations, wedding dates, vacation departure dates come and go unchanged, but the emotional joyful celebration is missing.

I awaken to the sound of stillness--birds chirping at my window sill. A flutter of sunshine quickly enters my peripheral eyesight, as I slowly open my eyes. I smile. I look to either side of me and notice that my youngest daughters, Hazy and Rosebud, have climbed into my bed, perhaps fleeing the darkness of their room. Perhaps in search of sanctuary? Perhaps they miss the days when they could leave the house? Perhaps they miss school? Their grandparents? Friends? I’ve tried to keep things as normal for them as I can under these very unusual circumstances.

When an ending comes, what happens in your body? Do you get tight, contracted? What’s the emotional experience? Does it bring about anxiety, fear, sadness? And what happens in your mind when endings come? Do you have remembering thoughts or planning thoughts? How do you meet this experience? 

In a sense, we’ve been pressed into this place of greater intimacy with those in our immediate living space while at the same time denied the person-to-person contact with our circle of friends and co-workers. Our number of relationships shrinks while the intensity of a few relationships escalates.

I have on my computer a collection of some 500 poems. Each was chosen for a reason. Sometimes a line may have captured my attention, like Mary Oliver’s “You do not have to be good” or sometimes I come across a phrase that deserves contemplation like Stanley Kunitz’s “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Maybe I sensed a truth that I needed to hear (Patience with small detail makes perfect a large work, like the universe. Rumi Kapur) or was given a caution for a day that was to include unpleasant circumstances (There’s no use hiding it / What's inside always leaks outside. Yunus Emre)

In silence the inner critic becomes shy, I am able to be enough. I am free, confident and able to embrace my wholeness. I answer to no one in silence - when I want to sit, I sit. When I want to walk, I walk. When I want to experience a cup of hot tea, I linger. 

If we are going to work towards a compassionate Richmond, we’re going to need a mind shift.  Martin Luther King, Jr. has said “One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. Only through the bringing together of head and heart-intelligence and goodness-shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature.” Do Richmonders have the imagination to get us to this place of head/heart connection? 

“May I receive more than I give so that I may sustain change with grace.”

I came up with this intention almost 20 years ago after attending a week-long intensive entitled Sustaining Change. At the time, I was involved in learning a new healing modality. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes in me, the work, the culture, and with technology. Change was happening at warp speed and I was overwhelmed.

I’ve found observationally from having cancer that everything has to slow down.  I’ve narrowed my work hours down...because otherwise, I literally can’t live. Slowing down personally has made me realize that our collective pace is unsustainable. 

I have always been fascinated by the capacity of the human mind, body, and spirit to both endure and perform. I believe humans are brilliantly engineered to withstand, survive, and flourish amidst great uncertainty, against great odds. We have so much more than we think.

Just as I had made a list of my goals so many years before, I made another list of ten. A list of the ten things that open the heart. I sat with it. I read it over and over, and then I suddenly saw it as a mnemonic, CDEFGHIJKL. It was a way to remember each aspect of what I had learned. The alphabet of the heart.

A recurring story in my life is one of metamorphosis.  I start out as a caterpillar, small, green, and insatiably hungry. I cannot leave the ground. I squirm around, eating everything in sight. Then I give myself over to a process I don't understand.

My commute each day takes me across the Huguenot Bridge. In the winter, when the sun sets early, one sees some spectacular sunsets looking west up the river as you cross the bridge… carefully. That is, if one takes the time to notice and appreciate the sunset.