Writing
I was tending to my plants this morning and found this afflicted leaf, barely hanging on to life tucked behind a glossy green, newer one. I’d missed its signals of decay; the anemic tone and spreading blight in my rush of recent days.
It made me think about what a wise elder, a woman of 90, told me yesterday as I was sitting with her and she was reacting to the school shooting and violence in this week's news. She said “Everyone out there just needs to slow down. Tend to their children. Tend to their people.” For all the complexities of our world, our lives, our economics, I felt the truth of this simple solution.
We have lost each other on the way to some ‘greener’ destination that never quite arrives for most of us, despite all our hustle and distraction. What might we heal if we keep to tighter margins in what we need and what we can afford and step back into raising our culture’s children again? Step back into fostering and allowing a village to help us all do so? Lifestyle shifts, career shifts, the resistance to ‘outsource’ it to someone else, would need to be made to call back in the radical attention and time it takes to really notice a young person’s unfolding and encourage the individual on their unique path.
Families, friends, communities were once charged with this task to catch the holy spark they see in another and blow on it til it flames and lights their way through life. Our youth are suffering. They are alone. Many literally, most emotionally. Can we go to them and grab their hands and guide them back to belonging? Letting it take the time it takes. Parents, grandparents, mentors, friends of every age. Those with lived experience to share, those with broken hearts about who we’ve let ourselves become. Let us call each other back into this sense of each other as family, as each other’s protectors from storm. Could this vision be enough to stop the blight and decay and violence from spreading?