seeding hope.
august 2022.
As 2020 came to a close, I joined Inner Fields Collective, a collaborative social practice project, exploring the intersection of Dharma, radical ecology, and artistic practice. Earlier this week, we hosted our first in-person gathering since before this helter-skelter of a pandemic threw our lives askew.
At Seeding Hope, strangers met each other with the common greeting How did you hear about Inner Fields? All the tentativeness of approaching a new person, a certain shared suchness bolstering new connections. We meditated, we listened, we grounded and, together, we built a community altar. Though impermanent and ephemeral, this gathering made clear to me the power of intimate community. It felt like an opening and a way forward.
I want to share with you the words I shared during Inner Fields’ gathering. These were inspired by conversations with friends about what it means to be “on the other side” of this pandemic, the unfurling of COVID restrictions in NYC and the effort to make meaning of all that has happened to us since March 2020. I prepared for this sangha gathering backed by the sounds of Julius Eastman.
May these words and sounds be a balm to your processing.
Seeding Hope, Brooklyn, NY, August 2022.
There’s this proverb that I’ve heard repeated by several different Buddhist teachers:
“Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”
Which makes me feel like “oh shit” because more often than not, I am not taking the path of least resistance in my mind. I’m ruminating, thinking about what I could have done differently, how I would have acted with the knowledge and wisdom I have now.
Our mind has the capacity to generate so much energy.
So I wonder about this loop, that some, or many, or most here, will have found themselves in these last two years of the pandemic. Where we very often have been asked to proceed with a certain dissociation. So much of our energy has been turned toward the navigation of how to continue to despite ________.
Over the last few months, I notice more and more Brooklynites moving freely about unmasked. It unsettles me that these people live without fear. It also unsettles me that I continue to live with such Big Fear.
Lately, it really seems that we’re all ready to move to the other side of whatever this pandemic is, and I am eager to do the same. But I can recognize a part of my nervous system that is still heightened from the pandemic. I am still processing the radical shift of our reality.
My guess is that you have experienced something similar to this. That perhaps the texture of your experience is different but behind it is the weight of what happened to you in this time and how it affects how you now live. The observations you make. What you choose to do or not. How you move through the world.
I want to pause and call in stillness in the name of all that has happened to us. To our continual processing of a moment. You and me here with only the distance of our individual emotions separating the two of us.
What does hope look like for you? When I commit to stillness, repeated stillness, something of what is important to me becomes more clear. Something of a future begins to make itself known. Hope can have a fuzzy outline. Hope can look like just the beginning of a feeling.
I wanted to explore altars because mine has become such solid ground for my processing and grounding. Altar objects help make emotions tangible. When we struggle to experience hope within the body, these objects can support by holding our hope for us.
And because there is energy behind our thoughts. Because -
“Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”
We invite you to bring intention to hope by bringing an item to share on our collective altar. And with collective energy, placing hope in these items, supported and uplifted by the energy of others sharing and holding this space.
For a short moment, I invite you to close your eyes.
Bring past and future here to the present moment.
Plant this seed.
Maybe touch a hand to the Earth.
The Earth is our witness to all that happens to us.
xo Jessica
Work with me.
You can find me weekly at Heal Haus, monthly at Inner Fields and five-days a week at Arena.
🌞