Today I think of how all children are our children.  

In my neighborhood Next Door there was a report that an older White woman was tearing down signs that say “Black Lives Matter”.  When confronted, she said she didn’t want her grandchildren to see them.

I feel sad that there would be a differentiation between her grandchildren and all grandchildren, sad for her and her children and her grandchildren.

I wonder if this will be the final breakthrough.  So many times, we’ve thought we were there.  Certainly with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, I thought we were making a statement to the world, and now ….

And people are speaking up.  I read that an elderly White woman was escorted out of our local Whole Foods for making racist comments to a Hispanic woman.  She was told we don’t tolerate racism here.

I should feel happy about the positives in this and yet there’s something about those who still don’t see that makes me sad, and obviously there is more that I could see, and yet, I’m working to open my eyes and perception, to widen and broaden my reception.

David Abram says that where we might have thought our senses were antennae bringing the world to us, actually the senses are “gregarious”.  We live in an interactive world.  Our world is one of being in relationship, within ourselves and with this world we share.

Sitting with that, I give space to my sadness, give space to all that’s happening, the pandemic, unemployment, confinement, and now a clear exposure of the injustices of racism.  Perhaps each of us opens to what it is to be Black in the United States with dismay and sorrow that we’ve allowed it to go on so long.  

Yesterday a ladybug, a symbol of good luck was at my front door.  I sat with her and rejoiced with the omen.   She didn’t fly away.

Today I open The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.  I read some of the poems and won’t put them here.  I need to stitch my heart back together as the seams are broken open and I want to repair.