a moment to pause
Over the last few weeks, I've been listening to some of the first few episodes of current well-known podcasts. I returned to their beginning as a reminder not to compare my beginning to someone's middle; everything is a collection of the smallest parts, all energetic atoms.
One of the episodes featured social-justice badass Adrienne Maree Brown (AMB), and she talked about small never-ending patterns called fractals. In a very nerdy way, it was wicked cool, as they say in Boston. She indirectly described our Pause Breathe Reflect ripples - many small ripples lead to big waves of change.
"How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale...what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale…" - AMB
It feels like our is in an upside-down world. We disproportionally pay attention to celebrities, influencers, and top-down hierarchical leaders. Without mindfulness, we can miss all the moments between our moments that can come together and create actual change.
Ultimately, to change the world, we must start at the smallest scale, ourselves. It's not about waiting for the boss to make the first move or those other voters or the folks that "don't get it."
It's seeing ourselves as the first ripple that can align with other ripples in our neighborhoods, communities, companies, countries, and across the planet because if we're going to replicate things at scale, shouldn't it be something good?
New Meditations on Your App:
One aspect of Pause Breathe Reflect that I love the most is our ability to co-create our community and recommend meditations for our app. You can now find meditations that focus on end of life decisions, recovering from the an injury, and new Mindful Moment Greeting Cards to send to special people in your life.
If you have a meditation request, please let me know and I will record it for you.
This week's Poem:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you would not be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
wants to be beaten
wants to be pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one's skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe it's because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home unless home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Home by Warsan Shire