Amidst the escalating violence of the world, we feel we would be remiss if we continued to write without honoring the moment, honoring the grief we hold, honoring the grief of the Earth, if we did not give it voice. If we didn’t pray out loud. So here we offer this humble prayer, voiced out loud to all the beings who might hear. May it meet you in a moment of heart-stillness.
May you also be praying with us for
Peace
Peace
Peace.
As the holy lands of Palestine fill with bodies of dead mothers and infants, this whole earth is cursed. Genocide is not death. Genocide is disallowance of dying, it is blockage, it is desecration.
Acknowledging is a deeply spiritual and material act. It is to open oneself up, and to allow oneself to shift/be shifted.
We pray for those who have died and continue to die not in the proper way of death, we honor their passing as a passing, and we bear the pain, anger and sorrow, even if it bursts our guts.
We pray for the systems/structures/myths of genocide so steeped in One-ness, those which center themselves on militarization, on ecological and cultural plundering, on human-centeredness, on colonial dominance and whiteness, that may they end their torment and allow death to hold them. That may they decay, may they be de-energized, and may our individual and collective tethers to them keep breaking.
We pray for the cracking of the horrific layering of war and murder onto the day-to-day economic realities we enjoy, the way we so easily buy and consume, all that we translate our money into that is fed deeply by war, all the rights and freedoms we are addicted to.
We pray for ourselves, that may in these times of burning grief we accept our incapacitation, that may we allow our breaking down, that may we begin to hold our own ‘individual reality’ as a collective dreaming, that may we shed wholeness a little to embrace how broken we really are, and may our prayers more and more be an honoring of a different world-reality that is needed.
May our tears water the Earth for new worlds to sprout, worlds that know peace, and love, and beauty and freedom in their entirety: in kinship and inter-relation. May the cries of the mothers wronged, may the cries of our horrified hearts, be enough to wake the balancing of life. May it close the festering tears from where this violence upwells.
We pray for the decomposition of toxic world orders, we pray for the decomposition of our own selves so fiercely enlisted by these toxic world orders. We acknowledge that there is more than human agency at work all times, and that change does not have to come only from us, from humanity.
We acknowledge and remember that change is deeply microbial, chthonic, animal, vegetal, planetary, solar, lunar, cosmic, atmospheric, invisible, trickster and godly. We pray that these beings, these agencies be with us, may they grace us in this decomposition.
We pray for rest.
May we rest our weapons and in the enchantment of our resting forget them. May in our resting we open ourselves up to other-ways of being in the world which do not rely on extraction which triggers a whole industrial-economic-psychological response to arrange for this working. May our addictions to working be put to rest.
We pray for Rafah, we pray for the people, the children, the holy mothers and animals, the trees, the rivers, the loam, the hills the everythings stuck in the configuration of genocide. We pray that may they be received by the ancestors with tears of love, and rest and compassion that transmutes. We pray that they rest too, for the distortion of trauma to not haunt again and again, as it has, as it does.
We acknowledge that it is not only the oppressed who are stuck, but that the oppressor’s stuckness is also a vicious yet deeply influential reality that arranges these structures of murder. We pray for the liberation of the oppressors from their own torment.
We pray for all to know peace in their hearts amidst this cracking. We pray we all sink deeper into our conviction for love.
In our hearts, we pray:
I can only attempt to transmute the shattering of my heart,
Into words.
Flimsy, incomplete, hollow,
words…
That will maybe,
hopefully,
be vessels,
for the swelling
of the turbulent waters,
that crash inside me.
I see you,
children of Gaza (of Congo, of Yemen, of Sudan, of Myanmar... Of… of...of...)
I see you,
bright eyed and beautiful.
children who die for our sins
your grief,
your denial of liberation,
is a mirror,
of how we have done this to ourselves
of how we have done this to you
The Precious,
The Innocent,
The Full of Life.
In the whistle of the bombs,
In the fire of all burning,
I hear you scream,
“Look at me,
Look at me.
Do not look away.
I am life dying. I am the past torn open.
I am the cycles that never closed.
And yet,
And yet,
I still dream of peace and freedom.
Of home, and mother, and fresh bread.
I dream for all of us.”
“We all wish to write the poem that will end this violence.”
But what is a poem
to the shadows that still swallow our hearts.
The shadows that we will not let go of.
What is a poem to the darkness,
that has morphed and slithered through time.
Killing the indigenous, killing the different,
implanting false white skins over all,
those who do not look and think like it.
What is a poem to the ways this killing,
is us.
