Hello you,
I’ve been thinking about the four men carrying away a black woman, one situated at each of points of her limbs. I wonder if the song she sang, clear and loud, reached their ears. “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me”. I wonder if they noticed that their skin was so close in tone to hers as they carried her limply resisting form towards the van.
I’ve been thinking about the man, clad to the gills in riot gear, who slammed a 60 year old white professor to the ground. Whether he felt the texture of her soft jumper against his skin as he wrestled her slender wrists behind her back. If he noticed the ash blonde of her hair flashing blue then red then blue, reflecting the police lights.
And I’ve been thinking about the people sitting at their computers in darkened rooms, pressing the buttons to program drones. Bombing the rubble of Gaza into smaller rubble that buries the people who once lived in this place, feeding their cats off cuts of fresh fish as they cooked dinner for their family. I wonder if it feels like playing a video game. Blips on a screen. Detached. No bodies, no blood, just a target hit, a job done. Beers after work to shake off the scratching darkness twisting in your throat.
And I keep thinking about what a person has to sacrifice to be able to dominate.
What parts of you have to be pushed aside? And how does that unfold in the wholeness of your life? What does that feel like in your body?
Please don’t mistake me for an apologist. I’m not. Just trying to move beyond the binary of the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’.
Because any feminist knows that the patriarchy royally fucks up men as well as women. And any queer knows that heteronormativity is a straitjacket for the straights (pun fully intended). And any curious white person might wonder what has been lost for the power of whiteness.
The price of privilege is paid in connection.
I’m not a violent person. I’ve never thrown a punch. Never pressed someone’s cheek against the cold ground with my forearm. I’m not even good at killing spiders. But I am a white woman, daughter of a land colonised by my ancestors, living in a land that colonised vast swathes of the world.
I know that the capacity for domination is my heritage.
And I can recognise the energetic signature. That the cops arresting student protesters and the army personnel doing as they’re told to orchestrate a genocide are just another expression of the same story of disconnection that greased the wheels of colonialism for a long time.
Disconnection from life. From one’s fullest humanity. From spirit. From recognising that we’re all irrevocably intertwined on this miracle of a planet spinning in a vast miraculous universe.
And I think that we get to birth a new reality. Humans created this one, let’s make something better. Each of us in our own body, in our own way.
And to do so we’re going to need radically different tools than what this culture rooted in dominance has handed us. Tools that create connection to ourselves and the world beyond us. Tools for attunement, softening. Love, even.
It’s with that love that I think about these cops, these soldiers. On a good day, when I’ve had plenty of rest and I’ve felt the warmth of the sun on my bare skin, I might even be able to stretch to a politician.
It’s something similar to the buddhist meta prayer – a wish for them to be well. A wish for them to reclaim their connection to life.
Breath Spells : We gather this SUNDAY!
A group breathwork practice for witches, creatives, weirdos and change-makers. May 5th, 7pm BST (find your timezone here)
Yes hello! This Sunday Breath Spells is happening. A place for imagining better worlds for ourselves : Breath Spells is where we practice aligning to the things we desire most. Casting personal and collective spells with breath, words, and rest.
We do it together never alone. Building a web of connection across time and space.
We write to get clear, we breathe (using a mix of steadying diaphragmatic breath and activating 3-part breath) and then we drop deep into rest to let it all integrate.
And of course it will all be recorded in case you can’t make it.
Gosh I love this Elle, beautifully poignant & thought provoking 💕