Risk It

Photo credit: @ttaitphoto

This song came up the other day as my iTunes was cycling through my library of music. It does this when I don’t tell it what I want to listen to in the car, or even connect my phone, which is a complete mystery to me, but on a warm, sunny Friday, there it was: Nahko and Medicine for the People singing out this song from several years ago. Out of nowhere, it gave me this wild gush of energy that felt like it was maybe three parts gratitude and one part hope. It made me feel like my actual cells were blooming, sending stardust into the air, and then pulsing with an incredible energy while it all sprinkled down onto my shoulders, my lap, the interior of my VW wagon.

I first heard “Risk It” in Vermont, where our family (me, my husband, and our two sons) were living at the time…I was teaching yoga at the inaugural Stratton Mountain Wanderlust Festival (just two little classes I got to teach as a local instructor, but they were accompanied by my dear musician friends Veena and Devesh Chandra, and they were magic). Nahko and Medicine for the People were playing in the evening, maybe Saturday of the long weekend event. I had never heard their music before, but I was eager to take advantage of the full weekend pass that was my “payment” for teaching at the festival, and my friend Marissa was keen to check them out.

It was an amazing evening, full of joy and dancing, and imbibing—of beer, yes, but also of a vibe of love and inclusivity that has never been truer. And at the end of the concert, when the entire set list had been played, and then some, this: I remember Little Bear (Nahko), the lead singer of this fabulous band, holding up his cell phone to capture the crowd’s wild approbation on video. I remember seeing the elated and grateful expressions on the faces of the members of the band as they exchanged glances and held hands together, lifted them over their heads, as our applause filled the air and rained down on the half circle arrangement of their glistening bodies on the stage.

That night I felt that I (and the other few hundred people in attendance) were sharing a moment with this beautiful group of humans…a moment in which they had somehow arrived. Who is to say what constitutes arrival or even how it looks when it happens, but this—this was most definitely an arrival. Of course they weren’t aware of me sharing in it, but I was part of the collective voice that affirmed their vision as artists and the undeniable truth of the power of their musical offering. They saw us moved—as a whole—by their music and especially, at least for me, their lyrics. They sang of beauty and gratitude, of personal power and cultural connection. They sang of healing and of forgiveness, and they sang of fighting—for what one considers to be of value and worthy of sacrifice.

After that night, I listened to their album Dark as Night endlessly. It made me feel so good—whole somehow. And it was soon after that our family heeded our own “call of the wild” and moved to Colorado. I listened to that album, and later On the Verge, driving up and down the I-70 corridor between Vail and Eagle, for ages. In 2015 Nahko and Medicine for the People appeared in the Vail Valley’s Hot Summer Nights free concert series, and my family and I saw them there again. My children witnessed their mother dancing and singing with total abandon in the otherwise fairly tame Vail crowd (this wasn’t the first time), and we all enjoyed their music together. There was something holy in their gift to their audience, to their listeners. And there was beauty in all of it.

The move from Vermont to Colorado was not our last. Our entire life together, my partner Dwaine and I, has been a long, slow migration toward New Zealand, I realise, because we have landed here with a sense, for the first time, that we have actually arrived. I have wanted this feeling for a long time, and I have looked for it, but this is the first time I have ever felt it. I have even tried the word on in different places: Home. But that word is an oversimplification, and perhaps even an injustice to the turtle shell of our marriage and family nest that we carry with us wherever we live on the globe, because it’s more than that. Or at least different. What I do know is this: we have arrived.

We’re not finished traveling. Of course we’re not. The world is temporarily closed off to itself, but our extended family are spread all over North America, and we will go there again to be with them. I have no doubt about that. And they will travel here to be with us, too. But having arrived in this whenua, this beautiful land, and begun to give back to it, to share our selves with the people and their place, Aotearoa, there is a kind of peace that is indescribable. And a jubilation that is captured perfectly in this song…”Risk It.” Moving from Vermont to Colorado was a risk. And it proved to be our most challenging move in a financial sense. There were moments that first year in Eagle County I wondered if we’d done the right thing. But then it was clear—we were exactly where we needed to be. For so many reasons.

Then, in the blink of an eye that was four years, it was time to leave. I felt it fiercely. And I was ready to go. Trump was elected president, and for me that was a last straw. I applied for a visa to move to New Zealand. It turned out our timing was not right, and I actually had the whole, laboriously collected set of documents returned to me. One critical piece had expired waiting for the next, and the whole thing was invalidated. That was in 2018. I was confused and discouraged and didn’t have the heart to resubmit it. I have been on the planet long enough to know that when something is right, all the doors leading to it swing open. There is ease in the rightness. This was not how I was feeling about the path to New Zealand that year.

I had a rising sense that we would be arriving in New Zealand as refugees somehow. Dwaine is used to some pretty out-there ideas from me, but this was almost too far fetched. He didn’t deny what I was saying, but he certainly couldn’t say he agreed or saw it too. When things are ‘normal,’ it’s hard to imagine them otherwise. But I could see that his job was wearing on him…too much time spent in the underbelly of our little county, too much energy spent trying to lift a very heavy darkness. And I myself was jaded, having spent too many years, it felt, doing what was easy—serving the children of the privileged, who were happy to recognise me and my gifts. Over 120 people had lined up to apply for that job. There was work, I knew, that was less attractive to the many and which utilised my unique gifts. Specifically, I wanted to work with underrepresented populations. People society forgets or discards—kids who have been given a raw deal. If you can do that sort of work, I have always thought, you should.

At the same time that these feelings began to grow in me, I began exploring what seemed like a new ability but which I quickly learned was something I’d had some spiritual understanding of for most of my life. This exploration was of what it means to serve as a medium. Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. Sometimes I still feel that. But then someone else who is hurting asks me to help them connect with a loved one who has passed, and I can’t say no to them. In fact it’s a commitment I’ve made to myself and to the Universe. When asked, I will say yes. There were two years in Vail that I got to just practice—thank you to the many friends who trusted me to practice opening what in those days felt very much like a bad telephone connection—you know who you are! They were two years that overlapped with our exit from the place that had served its purpose in my evolution as an individual and in our family’s journey.

After a short burst of energy around moving to Hawai’i, which also did not manifest, we ended up back in Santa Cruz, my childhood hometown and the home of my parents and my brother with his sweet family. I took my first true alternative education position and was tested and tried in ways I’d never imagined. I was also more deeply rewarded than I’d ever been for any work I’d ever done. Personally, I felt it as a lovely pause, where I got to host “family dinners” for my mom and dad and my brother’s family. Where I could stop by my parents’ house and enjoy chatting over a glass of wine on their back patio on a Friday evening after work. Where we got to attend nephews’ baseball games and my sister-in-law’s chorale group performances. Where time seemed to stand still for a bit.

While I never felt like moving to Santa Cruz was forever, even I was surprised when the time for our exit from there arrived with such haste. The political climate was rising, beginning to burn us with its inequity and its inanity, and then Covid fell upon us all like a predator. Two months into Covid in California, with our younger son at university in New Zealand and our older one on his way back there to train on snow, we did the unthinkable. We planned and executed an overseas move in the middle of a global pandemic. It was crazy, for sure. Selling or giving away all of our stuff on Facebook (there was no way to have a garage sale or to even drop things off at a donation station). We had to coordinate the selling of three vehicles and the surrender of our rental home with our international flight. There could be no interim accommodation (hotels weren’t open, and we were too afraid to stay in one anyway). The list of crazy details goes on and on and paints a picture that is an awful lot like fleeing. Refugees indeed.

In short, two cancelled flights later and after a delay that put us in a hotel for four days in a different departure city anyway—we boarded a plane for New Zealand. It was surreal and absurd to watch the explosions of colour along the darkening skyline of Los Angeles as our airplane lifted off. The irony was not lost on us that the Fourth of July fireworks, prohibited because of the pandemic, went on long after they were no longer visible from our chiclet-shaped windows. Finally we dropped our masked heads back onto the headrests of our seats and closed our eyes. The three of us were on our way across the sea to our baby bird.

Managed isolation and the transition itself is a story for another day, but suffice it to say, we finally landed on solid ground. Every door opened to us, too, the way doors do when you are moving with the flow of the Universe instead of against it—from finding a good vehicle to landing a home and jobs with lightning speed. We were received with love by our New Zealand family and by our new community. And all of it was a risk. A huge risk we took to follow our hearts and souls. To be near our baby. To be far from the strife we saw enveloping American politics and society. To be in a place that has called to us since we were so, so young—the place where I heard for the first time that I was a healer. Auntie Sylvia said those words to me in Nelson when I was only 24 years old (I remember wondering then if I should have gone to medical school!).

Today I answered the call from one friend to help another and did a mediumship reading by Zoom. The distance between us was over 8,000 miles, and we had never met before today. I didn’t know a single thing about this person, except that we had this lovely friend in common and that she had a deceased loved one she longed to hear from. As always I had no idea what to expect as we opened ourselves to hearing from Spirit, but also as always, the result was an incredible gift to me and to the woman. For me it was an affirmation—that this gift needs to keep being offered, because it is so natural. So real and easy, really, because it is aligns with what I can only understand now as my purpose: to help people heal.

And it was a gift to her, because I could see on her face, feel in her affect, that she had, in the space of about 40 minutes, received all the confirmation she needed to know that her love still exists and still sees her. Is still accessible to her. Oh! What an important gift to be able to give someone! Grief is not something that I can dissipate. It’s real and it’s important and it’s a legitimate response to losing the physical form of the people we love. But I can apply a salve so soothing and so healing just by opening my heart and mind—listening to the messages given to me to share with loved ones who are still here on Earth and who long for such reassurance.

So as I listened to the chorus of that song in my car on Friday, it was all I could do to contain the joy (and also the tears) that rose in my heart like waves. Nahko sang: “I never thought I needed medicine / but I was spiritually dying, I needed some healing / so I opened my mouth and took a dose of the music / then I sat and prayed for guidance, now, teach me to use it / I pray for guidance now, teach me to use it.” The medicine was more than the music, of course. For Little Bear it must have been literal. The music is his medicine. It’s also his gift to wield among the people—the way he helps them heal themselves. For me it is metaphoric. The music is the expression of this thing that I knew I needed to do—this distance I needed to travel. It is also the expression of this thing that I know I need to keep doing—keep saying yes to. I need to keep listening to the souls of the departed. I still marvel that I can say that without fear. I never would have believed it.

When I heard this song those many years ago, it was like the little sailing canoe I boarded for the long, slow journey here to New Zealand. It represented the fearlessness I would need to embody in order to keep going. And today it shows me the truth of our migration. Of my bravery. I keep going—offering my gifts in the healing of others, whether that’s through teaching them or through providing a reading for them, helping them hear from their loved ones who have made their crossing—and I keep giving. Aotearoa has opened her heart to me; she is the whenua of my husband’s ancestors and she is the piko (the navel) of my spiritual life. I know this now.

And there is another line in this song that is important to me. It is for all of the people I have had to say goodbye to along the way. All those who keep going too, living far from where I am today. In Vermont and California, in Europe and Asia, in Hawai’i and Colorado, in Alaska and even the British Isles. We’re scattered like so many seeds. But we are together in that we share the planet, this air, this beautiful moon. Nahko says, “Well if I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” He says it again: “If I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” Yes and please. May it be so.

The Sum of Wills

Image by Myriams-Fotos on Pixabay

Today I am tired of reading the news and making conjectures as to how things will turn out…around the pandemic. Around the inauguration. Around people’s understanding of what’s really going on. But something I read this week made me take pause in my wondering. It made me change tack a little bit too. It was Mike Pence’s letter to Nancy Pelosi explaining why he would not be invoking the 25th Amendment against President Trump.

Like most of the people who are (still) friends with me on social media, after watching live the insurrection and attack on the American Capitol for an entire day (it was like a train wreck—I couldn’t look away—plus, I knew that history was unfolding before my horrified eyes, and that seemed like something I didn’t want to read in the past tense), my impulse was to demand that Donald Trump be removed from office immediately. I mean, I wanted him to be removed from presidential candidacy immediately after the recording broke of him bragging that he can grab women “by the pussy” with impunity, so what do I know? Still, holding him accountable for inciting this nefarious business at the Capitol, it seemed like something even the misogynists in the country could get behind. How could we tolerate a sitting president so clearly inciting and encouraging an actual attack, an attempted coup, on the nation’s Capitol?

And then I read the letter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the impeachment. Let’s not reward an essential enemy of the State with lifelong income, personal protection, travel budgets, and my favourite: the freedom to run for office again. And let’s make sure there is no equivocation around prosecuting him, to the full extent of the law, for crimes now known and to be uncovered as the protections of being a sitting president are stripped away from him. But Pence speaks in this letter in such a level-headed way about two things: first, he points out that “under [the American] Constitution, the 25th Amendment is not a means of punishment or usurpation” but rather a means to “address Presidential incapacity or disability.” Indeed. Fast forward to two weeks from now when Joe Biden is the sitting president and his enemies in Congress (I know, it’s strong language, but I think recent events have warranted it) decide to call him unfit for office, make it a “judgment based on a comment or behaviour that they don’t like,” rather than on a “medical decision.” Okay, okay, so right now the Democrats have the majority in both the House and the Senate, but as we have also seen, as evidenced by recent events, such power can swing in an instant (or with a single state’s Senate race, as it were). And then what? And what about the next president that elected officials don’t like? What is to stop them from making a similar decision based on lesser offences with the removal of Trump from office as the precedent?

Pence also points out that “last week [he himself] did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond [his] constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election” and declares that he will “not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the time of our Nation.” Okay, so I don’t know that I’d call invoking the 25th “playing games,” and of course I don’t trust the purity of his intentions when he says, “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation” (he would be the only politician I trusted to tell the unmitigated truth if I did). Still, I believe he is right when he says that invoking the 25th against Trump right now would “set a terrible precedent.” Always, when you flip perspectives, put your own ideals in the opposite corner, the receiving end, of the action being considered, you have to cool your jets a bit. I don’t think this is what Pence is up to in saying this, but it’s the truth that is revealed by his words.

Plus, will the final outcome of invoking the 25th be so very different from that of a successful impeachment? And why the rush? He’s been utterly emasculated through the removal of his platform, his megaphone, as it were. And don’t kid yourself that he is being censored. Right now it’s looking like he may be charged with treason. This isn’t someone we invite to address his followers en masse, and yet it remains: the man has access to the media and could address the nation—and the world—in an appropriate way if he were to choose to take the high road for once in his life. That’s not what censorship looks like. But I’ll tell you what is oppressive and fascist-leaning: removing a president from office without due process. Plus, which will be more damaging? Having Trump in the presidency for the final 12 days of his term, or dousing his irrational, radicalized, riotous followers with new fuel for their vitriol in the remaining days before the inauguration of the new, incoming president? It’s a fine line. Make no mistake: I am not now and never have been a Trump fan. I was mortified when he won his first election. But I am a fan of democracy, and that of the U.S. is on the line even as I type these words.

And this got me thinking about all of these people storming the Capitol, of the man shouting in one viral video: “We were invited here! We were invited by the president!” You know, he believes that. That’s the bottom line. All judgments aside—of how he arrived at that, of his level of intelligence for following someone like Trump—you can’t fight against a core belief. Fights against core beliefs are often to the death. Hence the stark fact that the greatest number of deaths inflicted for a single cause historically reflects those deaths that have been perpetrated in the name of God (I choose the English word for that entity here, but of course there are many others). We’re not looking at a simple fix. Of course we want one. And one that is expeditious. We’ve had a long haul. It’s why so many of us are willing to receive a vaccine that has been rushed in its preparation and approval for mass use. I will probably get it when it becomes available, but it’s only because I don’t know what else to do. It seems, with all things considered, to be our best option. Of course we want swift justice, too, when it comes to the president. But what is justice in this case? Donald Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Whatever is done to him in retaliation for his ineptitude, his inability to put others before his fragile ego, his deceit and bigotry—it will have lasting and far-reaching effects, not all of them desirable.

Tolstoy wrote, in his behemoth work War and Peace, “The movement of [hu]mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously.” He goes on to say, “To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units.” Tolstoy refers here to the error of attributing any historic action to the will of a single leader (or to any individual at all). The context is a discussion about how people often attribute the French “loss” at the Battle of Borodino (and the subsequent burning of Moscow) under Napoleon to Napoleon having a cold on that day and therefore not giving good “instructions.” He posits that not only did Napoleon’s cold not have anything to do with the outcome of that battle, Napoleon himself had nothing to do with it. Tolstoy says that in response to Napoleon’s orders, his very hungry soldiers “had nothing left to do but cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and go to fight, in order to find food and rest as victors in Moscow. Which meant it was not as a result of Napoleon’s order that they killed their own kind. And it was not Napoleon who ordained the course of the battle, because nothing of his disposition was carried out and during the battle he did not know what was happening in front of him. Which meant also that the way these people were killing each other occurred not by the will of Napoleon, but went on independently of him, by the will of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. To Napoleon it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will.”

The parallel between what is being said here about Napoleon and what is clearly true of Trump today is striking. It’s satisfying to take some of the “credit” away from him, I admit. You’re not that powerful, Donald, I want to say. But it’s more than that. What has been unleashed is well beyond his control and whereas he might share some of the values of this rabble, they are not in any way taking their ideological direction from him. That is not to take away culpability either. It is undeniable that Trump’s words to the people assembled at that rally on January 6th were inflammatory and obviously responsible for the entitlement those people felt as they stormed the Capitol, vandalized its sacred halls, and perpetrated violence that resulted in the deaths of five people. And yet…how much control does he really have over their movement? And how much of what has been unleashed will actually disappear with his fall from “grace” and removal from power. I’m afraid the answer is quite simply, not that much. We are a collective (the American public) that includes, for better or worse, the collective Trump extremists…all of us individuals, arbitrary, discrete units with no greater power, alone, to change the course of history than any other.

While I know that Tolstoy is arguing for a deterministic view of life and suggesting that all individual power to direct the course of history is illusory, even in those like Napoleon, because “the course of the world is predestined from on high,” I begin to turn this over in my head a bit differently. I think that the course of the world, and the U.S. as a microcosm of that world, is determined by that collective whole that is propelled not by something outside itself but by an energy that is derived from the sum and coordination of that arbitrary, discrete many. Tolstoy wrote, in that same work, that

to every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every administrator finds the chief reward for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark, resting his pole against the ship of people and moving along with it, that his efforts are moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move by itself, and then the delusion is no longer possible. The ship follows its own enormous, independent course, the pole does not reach the moving ship, and the ruler suddenly, from his position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and feeble human being.

So Trump is left with his flaccid pole (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one), and the truth is, our ship is moving along. We’re in a storm. And it can’t be said, now or in any future moment, that he is wholly to blame for this predicament. The most beautiful thing to come out of the debacle of his presidency is perhaps the fact that to the same extent that white supremacists have been emboldened to speak and indeed to act, black and brown people and their allies have been emboldened to speak and act to oppose the racially oppressive climate of the country that surrounds them. They have been empowered to point out unabashedly that things have, in fact, never been great in America if you’re a minority or a woman. They are speaking out and with a much more diverse audience that is primed to receive their message and their demands for change. It’s powerful. It’s real. This ship is moving. The seas are high, and there’s not a lot of control over our movements as yet, but we are definitely rolling.

And here’s something: I see posts of Kamala Harris’ unmistakably brown and black family members—her as a child in goofy little dresses and braids surrounded by the adult women in her life who look like her too. These are popping up on screens everywhere, and there are little girls all over the country, all over the world, seeing a Vice President who looks like them. Yes, we have another old, white, male president with some shady personal/familial history. What’s new? But he has a long history of bipartisanship, and he has chosen Kamala. She’s not perfect either, but here’s the thing: no leader is going to be. And if you ask Leo Tolstoy, perfection in one human, even a leader, won’t help us (conversely, depravity in one, even a leader, won’t end us either).

It is our collective energy that propels this ship, so the time is now to look inward and to decide what our personal contribution to that powerful whole will be. Will we send out a contagious lovingkindness while standing our ground, insisting that all lives matter and that today the ones that have been clearly undervalued in our country for so long must come first in our efforts to assert this fact? Or will we continue to “build walls” and allow our fledgling alliances to be destroyed by hateful rhetoric and ingrained habits of exerting power over others? It’s also the time to look outward and recognise that all of these other views and voices, not just our own and not just those of the downtrodden—they are part of the collective thing that comprises us. We’re going to have to figure out how to make some sort of sense in the great noise we are making, in the chaotic and divergent actions we have been taking. We all have some choices to make, I reckon. It’s time.

The inauguration of the new leader of the United States of America will happen this week. Right in the middle of the storm. There is change afoot, and we are surely moving, if not yet in a clear direction. As we cling to the decks and get washed over with the waves of this wild moment, may we understand that we are still afloat…all of us, together. May we also know the value of our own positive, loving, inclusive contribution to the sum of individual wills. May we send that contribution into the universe with words and actions that will, in time, right our ship and bring us HOME.