To be a Mountain
Rage, Maitri, and the Queen of Swords
I will continue with my decan journey next week, but for today I am exploring my own grief and rage around yet another school shooting. Take gentle care of yourself. CW: gun violence.
Yesterday I was a substitute at my childrens’ school for the afternoon. I spent a little time working one on one with a student and then the majority of the time monitoring the playground at recess. Every time I interact with our school’s staff my admiration grows. The work and effort and love they put into carding for kids makes my heart grow each time I enter the building. But as I walked through multiple locked doors yesterday, past ample security cameras, and was given my own neon reflective vest - I appreciated them even more. In our country, we ask teachers to literally sacrifice their lives for our children.
I came home to the news that 6 people, including 3 children, were killed. Murdered in the place that is supposed to be safest for them. Murdered in the building where they go to learn and love and be loved.
I was a student when the Columbine shooting happened. I know the exact stretch of road I was on when I heard the news of Sandy Hook. I have absorbed this fear and grief and terror for most of my life - both as a student, and now as a parent. I am so exhausted of hearing these stories over and over and over and over again. I have been crying all morning. I feel like a cavern opens up in my gut literally every time this happens. The well of grief in my chest is so deep. There is a video circulating of a woman interrupting a newscaster on the scene to say, “Aren’t you tired of this?? Aren’t you tired of doing this?!” I am screaming this with her. I’ve already sent off emails this morning to my governor and senators - Ohio has some real gems at the moment - but it does NOTHING to assuage my grief. So I sit on my cushion and try to meditate, try to pour my presence into the lower half of my body, away from my spinning mind. Trying to keep my body grounded to the earth, so I can be a mountain in this storm.
I’m in a course right now on Maitri1 - an essential human practice of courageous lovingkindness. My love is utterly entwined with my grief right now. My heart is both expanding, and also breaking into a million pieces. I am choosing to sit with the feelings that I have today and extend my own inner warmth and attention to them:
I see you grief. I see you rage. You’re allowed to be here. What can I do for you?
In our last meditation class (days before the shooting) we did a writing practice where we were given 10 minutes to free write on the prompt: What breaks my heart when I look at the world? I’m going to share some of what I wrote here.
What breaks my heart when I look at the world is how terrifying it is to be a child. How children have to go to school everyday with the fear that someone could enter their building with a gun. That the world is growing warmer and warmer and corporations are getting richer and richer. That children are being handed a digital childhood with all of its intensity and anger and overwhelm and violence…but the adults seem to be helpless to do anything about it! How terrifying to look around at all these big people who are supposed to be “in charge” and instead of seeing strong mountains, they see us with our hands in the air - “What can we possibly do?” or clutching our peals - “What is this world coming to?” It breaks my heart that the adults are refusing to be the sort of elders we need - refusing to slow down, be fiercely courageous, to put children over profits, to put values over convenience, to put people over ideology. It breaks my heart, and our children - the worlds children - deserve so much more.
This morning as I meditated and prayed and cried, I also drew some cards. I didn’t ask a question, I just let my feelings swirl like a storm. The three cards I pulled are stunningly appropriate. The Queen of Swords, Page of Wands, and 5 Cups.
The Queen of Swords is wise and perceptive and has no f*cks to give. She is Universal Mother energy, she is raising her sword and commanding, “There is no such thing as other people’s children!” She cuts through confusion with her intelligence, she doesn’t need to soften or mince words. She is Jacinda Ardern and RBG and Hillary Clinton debating DT. She is vengeful like Galadriel. She is fierce and formidable like Queen Ramonda. She is a Mountain. I need this energy right now.
Pages bring youthful energy and beginners mind, and the Wands bring fire and creative insight. If ever there was a problem in our country that requires these qualities - gun reform is it! We have to break out of old patterns and ways of seeing this problem. We are stuck as a country, with “two sides” at a seeming impasse. There is literally no more time for these old conversations. Time is up. We need to build something entirely new and dream new dreams.
The 5 Cups is a card of grief. Look how forlorn it is! It can’t bear to drink another cup of tragedy. It’s a card of heartbreak and reminds us to make space for metabolizing emotions. We can’t just hear story after story of devastating tragedy and not compost that shit. I can’t expect my body to hold so much grief and to continue on business as usual. Please make space for yourself to cry this week. Listen to sad music2, watch a sad movie, write, hum or chant or wail! Just get it out and greet whatever comes with tenderness and compassion.
I dream of another Women’s March, one full of women dressed in mourner’s black, tear-streaked faces, some carrying candles, others wearing veils to cover their anguished faces. I see this congregation of grieved mothers flooding the streets of Washington. I can hear us wailing and keening, tearing our clothes, throwing ashes on the steps of Congress. Our children have been killed in their classrooms. We will not be consoled. I hear the cries echoing off the buildings, shaking the windows with their terrifying intensity, until every lawmaker feels our lamentation and doesn’t dare show their face until something has been done.
Erin Geesaman Rabke is my teacher and I lovingly commend her work at Embodiment Matters to you! She offers online classes, poetry (I think one of her spiritual gifts is “collector of words”), podcasts and her teaching is so rich and so needed right now.
The song Djorolen, by Bela Fleck & Sung by Oumou Sangare gets me every time.
😭😩🥵 Thank you for articulating all of our pain, Lindsey. A women’s mourning march seems so fitting (and we allies would like to join). Also electing women, as in Michigan, to end patriarchal insanity.
I have barely begun to process the grief of the last few weeks. So much rage and pain. Thank you for writing this.