“we are accustomed to living in a place where there is no mercy.”1 i feel like we are also living in a place where people don’t imagine that they need it.
i do not feel enthusiastic. my heart is not bright.
Ross Gay writes about how bees taught him mercy. i feel like i need mercy and i need to offer mercy, not as an act of generosity but as an act of survival—because it lessens suffering.
in the essay he describes poignantly how exhausting hostility is.
his experience being policed/glared at by a white lady in a thrift shop has stayed with me, the line “I just want a fucking chair” is in my running ‘ok wow’ document. He remembers thinking to himself, “No, no, dear lady. I just need a chair. I just want a fucking chair.”
towards the end he turns to the bees, how easily they could have stung him to death, and how they didn’t. “They didn’t believe what I thought — what I imagined — was real. They knew inside me was a truth other than murder.”
and, what if, like them, we chose not to believe the worst about each other? even when we’re sad? even when we’re afraid?
Larry Ward, America’s Racial Karma 107 ↩