soft and sturdy

reflecting on impermanence, emptiness and the unknowability of things

Dec 28, 2024

A red fabric with a floral pattern hanging from a fire escape in front of a brick building. The building has two windows with white frames. There is greenery hanging in the foreground of the image.

I spent the days before the 2024 election canvassing and making calls for candidates in the Hudson Valley. These were some of the most important races on the ballot in November and as I often remind my fellow New Yorkers, our raggedy ass state lost a congressional seat after coming only 89 people short on the 2020 census. This cascaded to the Democrats losing the House in the 2022 midterms. Sigh, I digress.

Canvassing shadows. A modest campaign rally along the Hudson.

On Election Night Eve, I spoke to a voter who, fatigue in her voice, asked if I could please take her off the call list. “I’ve asked you again and again.” I told her I understood, that I would mark her as Do Not Call, to have a good night. I reported this exchange back to the organizer I was working with and they said to record the voter as “Call Back”. And this, my friends, is not it.

Why is the default to barrage the voter to the point of exhaustion? We1 become noise and the voter becomes numb to us. After this exchange, I thought to myself, “There has to be a better way.”

This is both an affirmation and a question:

“There has to be a better way.”
“There has to be a better way?”2

“There has to be a better way” permeates beyond the current political crisis. Underneath it are questions of:

“What to do with all of this?” and
“I can’t be this tired all the time” and
“How?” and
“Against all this?”

This is where I find my friends and community landing in these days. This time feels like a collective breath-hold. I feel the taught string of my body and I can see shadows of a similar dissonance in others.3

Today, I want to write to you about how impermanence is teaching me to surrender to the immense unknowability of things. About how the huge gaping mass of unknowability can be a method of working toward a better way of things. And perhaps “better” isn’t the right language here. Maybe it is more an acknolwedgement of what has been, the information this provides, and how what has been informs what might be. Above all, the acknowledgement that all things are of the nature to change is deepenening how I show up to the work of living and this is what I want to explore.

This year has asked me to be in close relationship with death. Not only the passage of life from this realm to the next but the end of systems, the discardement of things that no longer work and the emptying out of a former life.

Where previous deaths in my life have brought the expected sorrow and mourning, the death of my Aunty Fenny and my cat Audrey in quick succession these last months has signaled something more different. As I said last month, death asks (or demands) that you to pay close attention. Death is loud, the ultimate teacher. I am keeping my awareness open to the lessons of this moment and the delusion of stability.

In Buddhism, there are these contemplations called the Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection, or the Five Rembrances. They go:

(1) I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond ageing.
(2) I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness.
(3) I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying.
(4) All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.
(5) I am the owner of my kamma, heir to my kamma, born of my kamma, related to my kamma, abide supported by my kamma. Whatever kamma I shall do for good or for ill, of that I will be the heir.
Thus we should frequently recollect.

To frequently contemplate these themes bring us in direct contact with anicca (Pali: impermanence) and dukkha (Pali: suffering). Age, sickness, death and separation are inevitable. Living with these truths, being awake and aware to the nature of reality, that all things will become otherwise, what do I want to do with my kamma (karma — action)? How do I relate to the present moment in such a way that I want to inherit the kamma that I have generated?

Dharma girly that I am, I keep impermanence at my hip. I’ve spent many years waking up with the remembrance “I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying4” on my phone wake-up alarm. I keep my wisdom teeth on my altar as a reminder of the impermanence of my body, of how quickly something can be of the body and then, suddenly, not.

With searing knowledge of the fragility of all things, I am experiencing a great clearing away. In the last months, the nitty-gritty of discernment has looked like dealing with what is directly in front of me. I needed to pack up my old apartment and move into a new home so I ordered ten large boxes and packed up my belongings. I needed to schedule movers so I did research on reasonable rates and signed forms. I needed to fly to Kenya so I booked a flight. I needed to help my cat leave her body so I scheduled appointments. All the detritus, whether that be my many overcommitments or excess political commentary was given up to be recycled, claimed by another or composted into the next thing.

In his poem, “Yes, We Can Talk” Mark Nepo writes “Having loved enough and lost enough, I am no longer searching, just opening, no longer trying to make sense of pain, but being a soft and sturdy home in which real things can land. These are the irritations that rub to a pearl.”

The pain of impermanence is not a question to be answered but an opening to deeper love, connection and liberation. The clearing away creates an emptiness from which the soft, quivering heart of bodhichitta, can arise. This is a compass toward what matters to me.

Wisdom informs me that no thing is solid, and still, my arms are open to give and receive compassion, to take care of those things dear to me. I make myself a soft and sturdy home in which real things can land. Soft meaning that my heart is broken. Sturdy meaning I can hold the transient, gushing body of feeling. This is also the revebrations of Kuan Yin who, broken apart and put back together, uses her many hands and eyes to listen to the cries of the world.

Our forever favorite, Audre Lorde, said “I think despair is an endemic part of revolution. No revolution happens within one liftetime so we work to capacity, we believe in what we are doing knowing full well we won’t see the fruits of our labor. It is a hard place to hold.”

Bummer that it may be, we would do well to remember that in organizing we will sometimes lose. It allows for iteration, for things to be different. One of the first feelings I felt Election Night as the results came in was “I’m not marching this time.” This is a variation of “There must be a better way.” I don’t want to call voters ad nauseam and I don’t want to ignore the inevitability of change. Instead, I want to have enough space / emptiness to feel the quivering of my heart. Working with despair, working to capacity, working with the knowledge that we don’t know. This is the place that I’ll organize from in the next year.

Dearest Friends, this missive finds me deep in the unknowability of things5. I have been in this place for months now and I am changed in ways that have not yet been revealed to me. I am listening / knowing that I have no choice / surrending / with my forehead pressed to the hardwood floor / in child’s pose / in chanting and prostration. When I lift my forehead / I will be ready to respond.

After all, despair, like all feelings, arrives and departs. Feelings being fleeting, they ready us for change and to act accordingly for the abrupt and swift, ever arising.

xo Jessica

Updates

Heal Haus. Given all the aforementioned transits, I am taking a break from guiding my weekly Heal Haus class. This break comes after four years of continuous weekly space holding and at the outset of starting my dharma leader training program with Spirit Rock. I am looking forward to spending the next couple of months purely being a student of the dharma and emerging from this period with new offerings (the seeds of which are currently germinating in my mind).
CALLL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Object Permanence. OBJECT PERMANENCE is a project exploring the animacy of the items that we hold on to, the stories we tell and how they relate to the large project of naming, experimenting and taking action to define oneself in the world. I am interested in how our objects communicate ideas and create understanding about our place and our position in a moment in time / understanding the stories that we tell ourselves / and how those stories are / aren't interdependently linked. As I begin this project, I am looking to speak with people about the objects on their altars. Looking forward to hearing from you and sharing more about the project as it grows. 🤓 You can read more and sign up here: https://forms.gle/GHr64xyhrhZ8W4UK8

This time last year, I had 126 tabs open on my phone. In an effort to clear them out, I shared some of them here. This year, I am at 93 tabs (progress) and hope to get this down to sayyyy 80 (ambitious) before the new year. Here is a selection of the tabs I have open.

Emma Dupree (1897 - 1995) was an herbalist in Eastern North Carolina. As a community herbalist, we didn’t set prices for her offerings and accepted trades for services.
Emma Dupree gathering goldenrod (which is native across Canada and throughout the United States). May I become an elder in her image: white-haired, gathering Earth, aiding community.
As I write this from my teenage bedroom (🥲) I am very close to the thirteen-year-old me who read “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana” several times over. Three years ago, Michael Azerrad wrote a reflection, “My Time with Kurt Cobain” for The New Yorker. If you were also filled with teenage angst, please give it a read and compare all your teen spirit notes with me.
Sebene Selassie
shared this in her latest Quarter links and OH GOD, I can’t stop thinking about it. It is wealth shown to scale and a reminder that billionaires should not exist. It makes me want to cry a little bit. See: WEALTH SHOWN TO SCALE»»»
Lizania Cruz and Melissa Johnson in conversation with The Laundromat Project about how artists and organizers work together to build sustainable, autonomous futures for diasporic African communities in Brooklyn and beyond. I appreciate the analysis of how the current Republic rhetoric around Haitian migrants aims to divide the African diaspora and how we must resist this dehumanization. Read: Art & Political Action: Black Migrant Justice
Me, referencing a white man’s work 😱! But it is true, I do have a tab open on William Eggleston after an instructor at the RisoLAB brought his color photography to mind.
William Eggleston, Untitled from the series The Democratic Forest, c. 1983-1986.
The title and subtitle from this Dean Spade op-ed say it all: “Our Best Option for Defending Ourselves From Trump’s Second Term Is Each Other: Policy solutions, tech fixes or billionaires won’t save us. We must commit to the work of mutal aid and direct action.” What particularly resonated in this writing is letting go of the fantasy that some top-down solution, policy, candidate or institution will save us.
Journalist Anna Sale on How to Be ‘of Many Places at Once. Me of Texas, NYC, and Kenya, all at once, related the conversation on where we want our children to be “from”.
The Afterlives of Audre Lorde by
J Wortham
, published earlier this year for The New York Times Magazine at the outset of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Survival Is a Promise”. Earlier this week I thought about cancelling my NY Times subscription and then I read this open tab and decided to stay for another month.
Audre Lorde in her home study on Staten Island in 1981, around the time she wrote her autobiographical book “Zami.” Credit: JEB/Joan E. Biren
“Not everything that's important to me needs to be my art practice.” Arists and educators Ari Wolff and Chloë Bass speak about being student and teacher for A Blade Of Grass.
I have this tab open even though the video is no longer available. Do you perhaps know where I can access it? Video: What Is Poetry to You? by Cecilia Vicuña
These Poems by June Jordan.