"the sky is not falling for the cedar tree"

i joined an interfaith prayer circle for Palestine yesterday. i was blown away by the beauty, by the depth of compassion and fortitude. i was grateful that they named that prayer is not enough, acknowledged the ways that prayer is used to bypass suffering and action. they named resistance as prayer, organizing as prayer. they named that prayer can bring stillness and spur necessary movement, prayed that we be gentle and that we be fierce.

one of the women in the circle said that she trusts life and trusts liberation. another said we can call back our spirits from the delusion of colonial domination as many times as we need to. we can call ourselves back by name.

they prayed for the ones who have not averted their eyes. they prayed for a costly solidarity, one that demands our transformation. they prayed that the crumbling places in us know repair. they offered prophetic witness, turned our vision to the future in which our children do not know hunger.

listening to the prayers, i was reminded of the below still from an interview in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. they’re killing our friends, too. all over the world, friends and strangers. we are losing people in unfathomable numbers.

later in the conversation, staring down the interviewer and seeming to bring him back to earth with his eyes, Baldwin says, “Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself, not to be.”

i think of the US-funded bombs that Israel drops on Palestine, on Lebanon. what has to happen to people to turn the sky against others.

the city street is now also the immensity of what we can witness in a given day through our phones. the hostility, the reactivity and refusal of soldiers, politicians, and weapons manufacturers lives in me too. the impulse to destroy instead of grieve is alive in me too, and encouraged by the country i live in.

what to believe in? what to insist on? how to decide not to be as years of terror pile up?

“the sky is not falling for the cedar tree.”1 we are surrounded by species who feel no need to weaponize the earth. these other types of life on this planet are older than us, know more about peace, about living, than we seem to.

they might help us “….remember / what it is that holds us; what in us / is held”