Housecleaning

And all the other shit we do before we make our art.

“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”

― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

The USO (United States of Oligarchy) has arisen.

While we watch what inkling of Democracy that was left, flippantly flushed down the toilet in a surrealist circus-kamikaze scene comparable to a late-night bawdy-toothed Karaoke session where only the truest and foulest of the drunks are left at that quintessential dive-bar, we have one choice to make. How will we respond?

This bar, with its milieu of sweaty bathrooms full of cocaine, regret, and dirty panties— fools too afraid to go home and face their own failures, is the lowest-moments-of-your-twenties equivalent to the political IRL trainwreck we’re in. The one that is, in sharp relief, highlighting the central fallibility of us humans: we let Tyranny in the back door of our already-crumbling bar without thinking too much about it, or at all, and now this motherfucker has set the whole place on fire.

An early morning practice of reading sacred text reveals these questions to me as I watch it all burn.

What am I doing?

Who am I? Who am I being? (Do those resemble each other at all?)

What matters now?

What always mattered that I ignored?

All that is coming forward for me is this: do our heART work. Get so close to our own central truth, that we become maladjusted from turning away from ourselves—from our own burning call to love. We align our days now to carve out the most space possible for our creative fires to burn with heat and transformation, in community and in solidarity.

The queen of all royal thought-leaders in the last century, Toni Morrison, declared, "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That's how civilizations heal.”

If you think you’re not an artist, you are wrong.

Sorrynotsorry—wrong.

Our heart has a language that speaks below the horizon of words and there lies your art. NOW IS THE TIME to dig into that art, because babes, this bar is on fire. Time to go home, sober up, listen, get clear, and do your heART’s work.

If you know the language of your heART, but you have intricately created a life where there is no room for it to be with you, as a central and holy practice, {speaking for an ahem, friend}, then the call is to rearrange how we spend our only non-renewable resource: TIME.

I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write…and you know it’s a funny thing about house cleaning…it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility or over-respectability to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be creative in stolen moments only.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

We missed the final call and let the whole-ass place be set on fire. The truth is, we needed to leave that bar, the archetypal landscape of distraction and denial, years ago. We have been busying ourselves with housecleaning and parenting and drinking and working and and and …..all the while ignoring the call to sobriety (for some of us literally, and for others, metaphorically). This call is the call that asks us to learn to stay with what is most uncomfortable. There’s never been a stronger call than now, to sit with all of the awfulness and pain and unfulfilled nature of our own lives and to feel it all the way, until it comes through our heART. The opportunity, now that the facade is gone, is to move toward the singing and dancing and writing and welding and building of a different kind of community. The kind that works interdependently and in solidarity towards one thing: the heART.

That time is now and we are built for this moment.