The world is on fire. Stay soft. 

I started my morning with some slowness that hasn’t been available for a few months: reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters from Love, Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals–if you don’t subscribe to these, I highly recommend–and a little bit of news. 

I feel like this is mix is indicative of my coping strategy these days … stay informed, but not overwhelmed … return to myself, return to the rootedness of the earth, the expansive possibility of the cosmos … notice the points of connection between all three that live in my body … notice my humanity … the separateness of my experience and the universal threads that bind us all together … again, and again, and again.

The world is on fire. Stay soft. Love harder.

I looked up at my dog at my feet and had a moment of remembering, two thoughts arising almost simultaneously: “I used to not be able to greet a dog” followed by “This is how our hearts become hard.”

I used to not be able to greet a dog. I used to blame it on the fact that I don’t like dog smell on my hands–or the smell of bleach, orange rinds, strong florals, and so on–but now, as I greet every four-legged friend I come across, I know that wasn’t the whole story. I couldn’t greet a dog because it was too vulnerable and I was afraid it might crack me open in a time and space where being cracked open felt untenable, unsurvivable. 

If we cannot find spaces where we are safe to be cracked open, where we can hold the full range of our humanity in the form of our emotional experience, then I fear our hearts will be hardened beyond repair. And yet, I also know the softening and healing that has occurred in my own heart, the same heart that had a full work up to rule out a potential heart attack when I was 43 years old.

It is inconceivably difficult to keep our hearts soft. I cannot say if it is harder than it has ever been before because some of the mechanisms at work have been at work for centuries. But maybe it is our never-ending and instantaneous exposure to the inhumane treatment of other people … the fact that we must steel ourselves every single moment of every single day as we are served up the emotional, physical, and mental distress and destruction of other humans via algorithm on multiple platforms.

Of course we wanna look away. Of course we want to look away. And yet, if we do not turn our eyes toward each other, if we do not make space for grief, if we do not return to love, compassion and deep humility, we will lose our humanity. And if we lose that, I am not sure what is left really.

My kids and their dad know that they have to pause the police and crime shows they are watching when I walk through the room if there is a traumatic event happening; particularly one in which a woman or child is being harmed. I choose not to expose myself to re-traumatization in that way. 

I once had nightmares for months as a child after watching Watership Down. And again after my mother decided it was a good idea for us to watch The Day After when I was as young as 6th grade. I actually took a prescribed antipsychotic for ten years to help me sleep because of the intensity of my adult nightmares.

Avoiding the trigger(s) could easily become an excuse to shield my eyes (and heart) from what is happening in the world. And I do. I do. I do. But then I remember that it is a privilege to be able to look away and I must not allow myself to default to that privilege, even if I still intentionally resist images being etched into my brain. 

I cannot tell what the right mix of awareness, attention and presence to world events is for you; the titration that allows you to stay connected to your own humanity while also not flooding your own nervous system to the point of helpless obliteration or oblivion.It does not serve any of us for you to be locked in helplessness or hopelessness.

But I do know that turning toward divine love, turning toward the earth, turning toward our humanity in all of its beauty and splendor, while also acknowledging and holding space for our individual and collective grief and suffering is the only way that I see through without the very life force in our bodies–our hearts–being steeled beyond restoration.

If we do not practice holding and tending to our grief, we won’t believe in or trust our capacity to hold it. And we won’t be able to hold love, joy, connection, compassion and belonging either. Because we don’t get to choose which emotions we filter. If we block one out, we ultimately block them all.

Tend to your nervous system. Titrate your exposure as you need to. Return to presence, connection, safety and belonging again and again and again. And know that if presence, connection, safety and belonging are not available from the outside, they are always available from the inside (and from furry friends).

Much Love, 

Booth