We're at the halfway mark! Hard to believe. This year has gone by so fast. And this is an interesting halfway mark for me. This is the first quote prompt that felt somehow wrong, or something felt off about it.
The prompt is about letting go of outcomes and a leaf being part of a whole ecosystem, which sounds like connection on the surface. But this week I started to feel a dread that we can get so far into the idea of the big oneness that we can't see the small disconnections this might cause on the ground, so to speak.
To be honest, my gloom is in no small part disconnected from my reading the book Selfie by Will Storr. That combined with reading two women's fashion magazines that have gone very serious and dark. Very dark. What a day it is when women's fashion magazines find themselves doing undercover investigative journalism about sex predators and incels? And yet here we are.
This month's Instyle did a full issue on "bad-ass women" and one piece stuck out, an interview with two journalists, one who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story. The other Cosmopolitan feature was about a woman tracking incels. Can I restate that these are women's magazines? I should be filling out the latest sex quiz, mocking perfume ads and reading reviews about the latest mascara technology. Not that I'm complaining.
We're not talking about hundreds of incels, either, but tens of thousands who are discussing the legalization of rape and disqualifying women from voting rights. And these aren't older men either. They're increasingly Millennials. And about a thousand of them might be militarized as well. This kind of puts microaggressions and glass ceilings in a frightening retro-perspective.
So… I'm alarmed and thinking about my haiku and also struggling with the enormity of the threat and how to behave as a citizen of a country turning very dark. A lot of the advice we've been trading, politically speaking, has either been ineffective or is solid but will need a generation to play out and bear fruit; which means a positive upturn in civil rights, science and economic fairness may not happen until after I'm dead. That didn't make me feel any better.
But it did make me more resolved to care much more where this little leaf falls.
The Prompt: Disconnection
Again this week's prompt comes from the Zen by the Brush book by Myoshi Nancy O'Hara.
"It couldn't care less
whose soil it may become:
Falling leaf."
– Zen Poem
First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.
The Drawing
My Haiku
…inspired by my drawing (and week):
In the letting go
a leaf has consequences
for the whole forest
The Reflection
I am not a leaf! A leaf doesn't have arms and legs or a voice or a blog.
Now it's your turn.
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