Follow your bliss…

Other than my shoulder hurting like hell I have had a pretty good day today. I am much more social and verbal than usual. We did a climate change action demonstration today and for the first time my heart wasn’t totally breaking while we were doing it.

It is a beautiful like 60 degrees outside and fall is in the air. We arrived at the intersection by the library and historical society just as kids were getting out of school. Over an hour lots of groups of several kids at a time arrived at the intersection and at least one kid in every one of those groups probably said ‘honk honk!’ to us and some were really enthisiastic to hold signs while they waited for the walk signal.

One girl was so enthisiastic vocally getting cars to honk for us. It is like none if these kids has any shame about holding signs and supporting the cause. Except maybe a little six year old or so girl in the back of a car who stuck her tongue out at me. Maybe her parents are climate deniers or something but I just thought it was cute and it made me laugh because she didn’t do it with a mean face so I don’t know. It is great when that is the only negative response you can remember! So many real and appreciative smiles from the people who are honking in their cars (and a lot of support we probably don’t even notice because people will smile or wave or whatever with wanting to disturb the peace by honking). You see people drive by and their expressions just let you know that they care and are happy you are there. I get a sense that honking or kids saying ‘honk honk!’ when they don’t have a car is like a welcome ritual for them coming home from school or work on Friday afternoons.

Every time we do this I am so… amazed by the amount of support we get which I never, ever would have bet on before I’d seen it myself. Making little connections with hundreds of people over the course of an hour around an issue we all care about feels really connecting and if I had more of these sorts of things in my week it would go a long way towards helping me feel less alienated and alone. I struggle every time though with the fact that with such a huge amount of support not a whole lot of action gets done. How do you mobilise people’s caring and passion, and there is so much of it, I am realising, into actual political change? The caring and action makes me optimistic, the barriers to making real political change, not so much.

I thought myself to sleep in Spanish last night. If spirituality is thinking with love and love is thinking with the heart (as I think Danielle LaPorte says) then thinking in Spanish is a good way to practice being loving? De todos modos la verdad es que empecé a rezar en español también y solo me recuerdo qué se dije que estoy muy triste. Y hoy me siento más feliz, o si no feliz, tal vez por lo menos estoy menos triste.

I just slip into Spanish even just now in writing this and I feel soooo grounded when I imagine someone *hearing* what I am trying to express in a deep way and understanding me and loving me while I am expressing myself in *Spanish*’. Something happens where I feel like I can finally be more intimate and honest with myself and those who would sit with me and really take the time to hear what I am saying… in Spanish… because maybe what I have to say is only expressable en español… are friends I know are really with me, as I am, in the deepest, most essential way, are those that hear what I am saying when I am expressing at my most intimate and tender, and I can only write feom
that place of deepest authenticity in Spanish, it seems, though I lack sooo many vocabulary and grammar skills that it is astounding I manage at all. Even communicating with a much smaller toolbox than a native speaker feels intimate, though, so will that experience deepen, or what would happen if I followed this track
of self-discovery and learning the art of just being that happens when I let Spanish take me deep into places where in English I could never go.

Maybe following this data is what puts me on Joseph Campbell’s path to bliss, how all the doors open when you find the track you were meant to be on, but what would you say to me, Mr. Campbell!? What if there is no track you were meant to be on and you know you won’t ever be even remotely satisfied with anything you have accomplished in your life?

Or could it be that following what feels good, in Spanish, what feels like it has heart, in Spanish, I will finally begin to understand what it means to follow my bliss? But now I feel sure I never will, but the only thing that comes close to a spiritual intuition right now and for a very long times says, follow this, whether this is my bliss or not. The only thing for being sad is to learn something, after all.

I think I am broken beyond hope of the optimism of believing that I could have something that is my bliss, Mr. Campbell. But when I drifted into Spanish there, it felt intimate, like sitting at a fire, but what if the place inside you where you are most naturally social is sometimes at least a place that you can only reach in Spanish and…