Take up the heart you came to heal; put down your dagger and your shield. – Roseanne Cash
I feel heartsick today. My body wants to push it away, my mind wants to push it away, but my heart knows enough to cherish it since it is part of me, it’s real and it’s here. I feel sad that we are entering into another presidential election season, with an electoral system that is so deeply flawed and inhumane and contrary to the compassion, kindness and creativity that I treasure about our species. Our electoral system seems intent on setting us on an insane hamster wheel: spinning and spinning with nowhere to go. I hope it’s not treason to question to my very bones an electoral system that requires us to join teams pitted against one another. This election year’s hypocrisies feel even more potent because of the deep partisanship that has become woven into the fabric of our communication, our relationships and our communities through the last decade; as we retreat into the tinny safety, cowardice and banality of cyberspace and stop showing up as multi-dimensional beings, capable of understanding and compassion, creativity and evolution. There is no creativity in a one-dimensional space. While trying to send heart-centered emails to my beloveds this morning, the sidebar on my Yahoo email page was continually spitting anti-him and anti-her hate slogans – soundbites calculated to contract its consumers with fear and suspicion – against people who may actually become our leaders! We are better than this, my friends. It’s time to take up our hearts and put down our swords.
It may not be simple to tell the difference between our hearts and our swords. When we are deeply passionate, the discernment process can be complicated and tricky. I’ve been watching a group of friends who are strongly backing a candidate and it looks like they are digging their heels in, bracing themselves and preparing for battle. They insist they have not taken up their sword, that they have embraced their candidate of choice because of the good they see in this candidate not because they are against anyone else. Still…I see a narrowing in their eyes and a set to their jaw that looks like righteousness to me. And a stance prepared for fighting. I don’t know what space is left for our heart to show up when we are contracted and clenched with the need to win.
Perhaps what most disturbs me about this upcoming election season is the loss many of us will experience: loss of joy, loss of vitality, loss of now. It is in our grim pursuit to gain something, to arrive somewhere, to attain a goal, that many of us will lose our now moments. It’s already difficult enough for many of us to slow down and savor our lives. I fear that during this election season, when we need to be most present and most available, we will become separated, more so than usual, from what is, in our pursuit of what we hope will be. And because we have set ourselves into camps (blue and red) what likelihood is there that we will be more willing to find compassion, commonality and possibility in the views of another? Worse, if what I’ve seen in folks’ behavior over the last three and a half years is any indication and with the stakes feeling so high in this presidential election, I fear that, for many, the necessary and life-affirming action of taking time to simply pause and breathe, enjoy and relax, may feel like a sin against their cause. When will we learn that our very resistance continually creates and revitalizes that which we are resisting?
I don’t have any answers. I don’t have a solution. I don’t know of a better way to choose a leader. I do have a vision, wavering and unclear, for what might be. It’s a waking up from the dream of separation from our brothers and sisters – a great yawning stretch and then a remembering that we are all in this together. This can’t happen in the middle of the Great Taking Sides, this Win or Lose that defines our electoral system. No matter who wins in November, where there are teams and sides, then a large percentage of our nation will have lost. They will not feel validated, they may even feel abandoned. And desperate. There has got to be a better way to invite a leader to take charge of our nation. Just because it is the way we’ve been doing it for so long doesn’t make it the only way and certainly doesn’t make it the best way.
I will stop here. I am a citizen of this flawed, beautiful society and I need to go cast my vote. Then I will return to my work, bringing as much joy and compassion to my moments as I can find.