I TOOK OFF MY CROWN IN THE MIDST OF THE WAR, FIXED MY ARMOUR ANd GRABBED MY SWORD. YOU THOUGHT I GAVE UP BUT LITTLE DID YOU KNOW, I AM A FEARLESS WARROR DISGUISED AS A QUEEN.”
– the silent warrior
There is deep wisdom and an origin understanding among warriors, we who know the scent and tang of tears, who stand like marble pillars of resilience against the crashing waves of a chaotic and unpredictable, contemporary existence.
This blog is dedicated to the conversations, learnings, and questions of warriors re-making the new world, me and the ones I collide with along the way.
We who tumble against the beachheads of an increasingly volatile reality, the first shoulder to the grindstone, the front that makes and protects the world.
We are the clean-up crew to the industrialists, the fascists, and to the old guard patriarchy who made up rules that left most people out of the game, and for whom the changed world scares witless as this corporatocracy realizes their hands are no longer tied to the wheel.
And as we learn harsh lessons and reconcile terrible truths about humanity writ large, as we choose to lean into the better angels of all our natures, our numbers go up. Our stock values are high and we are in demand.
We are the trudging ones, bearing the weight of everyday battles, and new not-so-everyday crises of epic proportion that have become our collective new norm in a climate and post-industrial ravaged existence.
We carry food and respirators, code and algorithms, and some of us tire irons and signs that speak of courage against tyranny, defending the ideals and the bodies and futures of those who either cannot defend themselves, or who need our help to beat back the calamity crafted by hate instead of love, or by a ‘profit exclusively over people at any cost’ mentality.
This mentality worked for a privileged few when resources were not scarce, but which was always wrong, and for which now cannot be continued because we are running out of earth and resource runways at an unstoppable clip.
We – as in every single human on the planet at this moment – must shift our mission statement from “mine at any cost” to “our’s at all costs” and to choose to act from the appropriate reality of survival of our species – all our species – and that means leaving no one behind. This is a whole new ball game now.
As a special cherry to the sundae of that truth, it now seems we must learn to persevere and retain our hope and our stamina past the hundreds millions of people on this planet who are not kind, who are critically under-informed about the truth of what reality is, and who are wholly disinterested in evolving or are manipulated and subjugated to the point of disability by profiteers and an old guard that would prefer to hang onto their carbon-fueled, command and control ways of being.
Battling this requires a special kind of resilience and grace, and a whole lot of new conversations and possibilities for doing what must be done.
“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”
– ROSAMUND STONE ZANDER, THE ART OF POSSIBILITY: TRANSFORMING PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL LIFE
We warriors make great leaders and builders, resistors and stans, and we are damn good caretakers and organizers. We are your best pals when you need the sword pulled or front defended to save lives, or to make lives matter or just our days better or possible.
We are utility players in the New World order. And we are increasingly NOT the most privileged. We come in all shapes and sizes and colors, and we bear witness to the pipe and engine systems of the details of what’s underneath the surface of society that makes it go. We also see it breaking under our feet because we pay attention, we expose ourselves to truths, and we endure what that means to get to the other side. We run toward the fires.
The chaos warrior does not lament, or regret, rarely looking back or racing ahead. And we exist in defiance of the norms. We have conditioned ourselves to be about ‘right now’, and we have adapted to NOT complain about bruises or pain, or tear gas or disappointment. Normal is no longer a word in our vocabularies.
Yet, wearing the scars of triumph silently, we carry the burdens of failure inside, and we only hear the clap of victory in our sub-conscious. The state of ourselves is easily lost against the clamor of all who we place before ourselves. Sometimes, we forget to pay attention to the things that become our blind spots, and we forget we share this road, together.
**
When I was a little girl and wore a pale yellow dress with a chiffon skirt that swished above my tiny, scuffed knees, I believed everything was possible.
Until life proved otherwise, at the tender age of 7, when I like too many other children of the world was violated by an old man in a park because I was a latch-key kid, a pretty girl, a trusting soul. That same year my father married a new wife and started a new life. I was on my own.
It was 1971 and I was also supremely gifted intellectually (not yet understanding this, so fully confused by that intellect), and I was a serious pain in the ass for my mother and probably a bunch of other people, too.
Before cell phones and the Internet and globalized fears of fascism that affected everyone and not just the disaffected, fear for me came in the form of isolation, of being placed outside the normal boxes by the rule makers and patriarchal system dealers. I did not want to join them, but I had to learn how to deal with them and take their abuse while still becoming me.
It all required a different kind of accoutrement, an architected skin and a psychology suit made for battles and not for barbies.
So, I evolved.
I became very good at fighting, building, surviving, and remaking myself and everything else, not noticing the strafe marks on me or others along the way. And insidiously, without my knowing or permission, all my yellow dresses ended up tucked away on a high shelf of regret.
Until one day a few years ago, when such a tragic thing happened in my life as I was organizing the chaos of it, I collided with an awareness of how much I was enduring and all my shelves came tumbling down.
This one life-cracking incident made me stop and see exactly how I had lost track of all the sweet and simple things that once defined who I was.
And then my mother died in 2018, and I began to feel a tension mounting, pushing against the impenetrable skin I had created to survive the gauntlets of chaos that had become my life. The tap-tap-tapping of a buzzing anxiety, always shrilling underneath the surface, telling me chaos was not a healthy diet choice even if the world was not going to cooperate as it races toward unfathomable levels of ambiguity and intensity.
I do not know if it is the absence of my mom which set this latest knowing in motion. Or Trumpism, the fear of dying from a new airborne disease, or the breaking of all the earth and our contemporary systems that I am now busy participating in fixing.
But something has triggered the realization that if I had never had to fight, resist, or defend I would not have acquired the tools, the intellectual wardrobe, the road rash of credibility that – coupled with a titanium backbone often-described as unemotional detachment to extreme circumstances – I could not withstand the crumbling weight of this life. And these are increasingly average skills and learnings we need to be able to rapidly instill in everyone to navigate this new world we tore down, so we can stand to work to make it all right.
I am selfishly curious about the programming of others like me who blaze trails and keep getting up to fight the good fight in defiance of anything that isn’t true, good, and accelerating for humankind.
I’ve learned, as all good warriors do, you can’t live into the full measure of your life or to what may to be possible for the world without accepting the truth of what is and retaining real hope as a part of what might be. I have also learned hope doesn’t live without fear and pain. and it isn’t an individual sport.
Horror doesn’t kill the sunrise: it merely mars a tiny piece of the landscape. Possibility is everywhere, even or especially in the weeds.
It’s getting really interesting now. Stay tuned.
