Falling Apart Together
Humans, to our grave detriment, have learned to go about their lives in one place as war is waged in another. We do it all the time. And, indeed, we’ve done so throughout time. The difference now: We can see, in real time, violence of unimaginable scope. We can hear, emanating from the screens that connect us to everywhere else, the wailing of those who have lost everyone who ever loved them. We bear witness to the terror of those who are nearly certain of their own ruination.
We have easy access to so much pain.
We lack spaces to metabolize it.
To grieve.
To honor the preciousness and potential that have been reduced to remains and rubble.
To imagine an end to the horror.
It is hard to know what to do about a war across the world. But it hurts us to do nothing more than gape in shock or add our name to a petition that exists only as pixels. We need to let ourselves feel the hurt – to protect our humanity and capacity for deep empathy in the face ongoing assault. Doing so is what enables us to act.
EcoGather, as an initiative, has no particularly special connection to the ages old conflict in the holy land (though we appreciate that members of our network do). Nor do we have answers beyond the obvious: avoiding political abstraction, resisting oppression, and choosing love, every time. But we do know the importance of coming together to grieve and integrate so that we may act, rest, and do it all again.
If you are looking for a way to honor the parts of humanity that bombs obliterate, to step closer to the people of Palestine and Israel by listening to their poetry and stories, to light a candle, to ground and fortify yourself for resistance to war, we’re sharing some resources shared during our recent impromptu EcoGathering held in the same spirit.
Neither a blog post nor an email nor a playlist nor some poems will bring back the dead or create safety for those in harm’s way. It will not change the course of geopolitics or the hearts of the power-obsessed. It will not bring an end to apartheid or war. But it might help us hang on to compassion and moral clarity as conflict contorts into genocide. It might let us fall apart together and reassemble the pieces of our broken hearts into something new. Something more capable of bringing the other worlds that are possible into being before it is too late.
Light a Candle - Zelda, a Jewish poet born in Ukraine, lived and died in Israel
All Walls Collapse: The Gap - Maya Abu-Al-Hayat, Palestinian Author, Mother
Enough for Me - Fadwa Tuqan, famed Palestinian Poet
Wildpeace - famed Israeli Yehuda Amichai
Gate A-4 - Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye
