everywhere everywhere everywhere
what they did yesterday afternoon.
by Warsan Shire
they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to 'okay' my voice
i said hello
he said, warsan, what's wrong, what's happened?
i've been praying
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
The poem above by London-based Kenyan-born Somali writer, Warsan Shire, came into my awareness this weekend while I tried to make sense of the violence that unfolded on Friday evening. It felt odd, wrong, to say the absolute least, to be witnessing these acts in live time while sitting with a friend at a bar downtown, eating popcorn, the world buzzing on around us, the news on TV next to the other TV playing hockey and the other TV playing soccer. It didn't feel real. It never feels real when the world falls apart like that and about all you can do is watch and hope it stops.
My stomach twisted a little further with each upped death count, with the awareness that comes in every moment we're reminded how interconnected we all are. That we are all each other have and we have to take care of each other. I remembered hearing and knowing how the entire world watched and mourned with the United States when the 9-11 attacks happened, and I thought, did their stomachs twist like this while they watched? Did the rest of the world buzz on? Did it grow quiet? My thirteen-year-old self's journal entry from that day has always struck me as oddly matter-of-fact in my adulthood looking back. I can only wonder if it may have been influenced by the 24-hour news cycle--sharpened in the wrong places, and smoothed over in important ones. They say this, they say that. Fear is a dominant theme. In loopy, large handwriting foreign to my own today I wrote: "I never thought I would live to see this sort of violence. I was wrong." Fourteen days later I returned to that notebook and you can read that the internalization of it all was evolving. My tone is uncomfortably lofty, like a teenager trying to write a presidential speech or a philosophical dissertation or something. Like I'm trying to take on more than I have the wisdom to process. But the writing doesn't make me wince so much as the fact that I had to write it. I debate the morality of war. I wrestle with the unfortunate nature of the news headlines. I say: "We can only hope that man will rise above its animal instincts and learn to love each other." I was 13 when I wrote this. Naive in all the best ways. I'm 27 now, still turning these same thoughts over in my mind, that it's all we can do to only hope and keep on doing that over and over every day. Hope isn't just there. It takes our effort to make it.
When I woke up Saturday I wrote in my current journal, a gratitude journal. It prompts me each day by asking for three things I'm grateful for. I write: that I am alive; that I am safe; that I am not fearing for my life. I walk out of a store and pass a homeless person on the street, their sign says they lost everything in a fire. And in that moment like thousands of similar moments, there's a stinging, fleeting flash of their pain, followed by a silent hope that it gets better for them. I picked up this habit through ahimsa journaling in my teacher training; I may not always leave a dollar but I try each time to put a silent prayer out there. I get in an Uber later on and ask the driver how his day is going, he says good, he's just grateful for every day. And in a moment you'd otherwise pass over and forget, there's a spark of hope and connection.
On Sunday I practice yoga with good and kind people and afterward, we sing. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. We chant the mantras for world peace, for truth seeking, for healing. For a moment, it feels real, more than just possible but actually happening. Peace, that is. And healing, too. I think of the first-hand account I read that morning that brought me to tears from a survivor of the attacks in Paris: "As i lay down in the blood of strangers and waiting for my bullet to end my mere 22 years, I envisioned every face that I have ever loved and whispered I love you. over and over again." Gunshots and explosions ending human life drowned out in a crowd of silent whispers of love.
Where does it hurt?
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere
Where can you find love? Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
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