I recently spoke with an old friend who packed up her overpriced San Francisco apartment mid-pandemic and traded what was expected for what she and a few suitcases would find in life on an island. Four out of five women in a Black women’s group formed through our Seattle-based church left the dewy city for other states during the pandemic, me included. Indeed, many people have found new perspective during this fifteen-month period when life as we knew it turned on its head.
Perspective gained during a pandemic doesn’t come easy. Some of us started out hopeful, resisted isolation and pushed down grief; others tried optimism until it faded into muted resignation. Still others faced fury, outrage, depression, disbelief. As our respective towns and cities begin to re-emerge from isolated realities, there is sudden opportunity for optimism and hope, both of which can usher in renewed perspective.
I started out in a place of optimism, convinced that the Holy Spirit was moving in and through the hidden nooks and crannies of the world. I could see it, in and through my friend’s lives---allies leading antiracism groups in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and DV survivors counseling women who’d endured their own abusive relationships. Earlier on during the pandemic--- before months of isolation from people we loved, the stress of being quarantined with or without other people, fear of a disease and the insanity of racial oppression and intense political division---I had an abundance of hope. But I confess that it was the latter months of the pandemic which really wore down my soul. By January 2021, I missed my friends. The ones I had left in another state; the ones who had moved away. I missed the rhythms; of putting my body in a space when and where I felt like it, without a mask. Simply said, I missed the joy of community and freedom I had taken for granted until this point.
By April 2021, things had opened up enough that my boyfriend and I decided to mask up and head to a tropical island. Before we left, his mom gifted me a lava bracelet (and a magazine with Stacey Abrams on it) to read on the plane. I mean, what a gal. Looking at the bracelet on my rich brown skin, I began to muse on the seven colors of the rainbow cuddled in between the other black rocks.
It was only once I stumbled into a gift shop on Hawaii’s Big Island that I came across a symbol of the seven chakras the colors represent: Crown, Third Eye, Throat, Heart, Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Root. Growing more curious, I zeroed in on an area where I have experienced challenge for some time. Located in the center of the lower belly, the sacral chakra houses creativity and zeal for life, as well as sensuality. In moments of quiet with myself, I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t writing; I wasn’t painting; I wasn’t creating, nowhere near the level I used to.
Over a year of isolation, fear and pain, had weighed on me. Where there had once been joy, it had been subdued. Where there had been delight, there was delay. Where there had been friendship, I found longing to be with beloved ones. Due to all of that grief, my sacral chakra was blocked.
Ruthie Kim said in a sermon she gave at Reality SF recently, “As we limit engaging with our grief, we also limit creativity and joy.”
While praying with the wonderful man I am in a relationship with, I have been awed at how he looks at life with positivity and optimism in light of the traumatic events his life has brought. His strength and compassion have been increased by the pain he has endured. Despite his scars, he looks for the good in life. In a moment of prayer with him recently I realized that despite my tendency to buoy up from anything life throws my way, I’d been worn down this past year. I had become stuck in the bitterness due to a world that seemed to be constantly on fire.
I need to name my disappointment at all the world (and my world) endured this past year and a half (or five, or ten years) and accept that it is okay to put some things down. Things that feel heavy…like bags.
Life sends us grief-filled experiences, which can be weighty. We have to deal with and face that grief. But we are not meant to carry the bags which other people place on us.
Though epigenetics may be a reality, and the wounds of our ancestors live in our bodies, we can choose to live our lives in ways that don’t continue to perpetuate the harm which was done. As friendships grow and morph and change, we too are allowed to grow into the people we are meant to be, even if that means apart from some people we once held dear.
We don’t have to just keep doing the same old thing because that is the way we have always seen it done. We can put down the baggage which isn’t ours to carry. Having lightened our load, we can then choose the mantles we carry for ourselves. We can make our own choices, which will impact our own future, for our own reasons. We can be who we were created to be, whether or not everyone else agrees with it.
Bags of co-dependency. Bags of self-dependence and idealism. Bags of racial trauma. Bags of friend’s (or family) expectation. Bags of disappointment, or even bags of grief. I can put some of these down. We can put these down.
This is a worthy perspective shift.
In naming and confronting grief, I can then allow myself to put down the bags I don’t own. I have room in my hand to pick up the mantles (dreams) which are mine to hold up… words spoken and written, and wide strokes across canvas, which are mine exclusively to paint.
It’s a process---I’m not arrived. I wrote and painted tonight for the first time in a while. I’m choosing to let go of the things that aren’t mine to carry and in doing so am discovering room to pick up the things that are. My sacral chakra is opening, healing slowly. I am re-entering the creative process once again.
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