NOTICINGS: Hold space.
Fruits of the unexpected.
'Dr. Atl' (Gerardo Murillo) (Mexican, 1875-1964), El volcán y la noche estrellada [Volcano and starry night], Mexico, 1950.Every GOP vote today is a Kristallnacht, a coordinated, deliberate effort to destroy and hold power over 340 million Americans. As I witness this calibrated horror, I’m reminded — hold space.
Hold space for the unknowns.
Hold space for lives broken.
Hold space for all lives filled with trepidation and deep worry.
I am worried, foreground or background, every waking moment. And sometimes in my dreams. In one way or another, slammed by the knowledge of great harm being done as I write, that may well last for generations, I turn to the meaning of hold space. To “hold space” for grief, for remembrance, for what may yet come is an ancient understanding.
Those GOP votes today on The Big Brutal Bill cross all boundaries of age, gender, and class. The Vote-a-Rama is being fiercely fought by the Democrats. And by you and me.
Yes, even the 1 percent. I believe their inner sense knows how they rob and injure. Yes, even the masked, unmarked ICE slayers know.Hold space for grief.
Hold space for the fruits of the unexpected.
Delaine Le Bas: In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold. Photo source: Stephen EllcockNow there’s an idea. Gold. Hold space for grief and hold space for gold for something genuinely, truly, truthfully, beautiful to grow from something small.
Hold space for the unpredictable goodness that will happen no matter what.
You might ask, like what?
Unpredictability is a feature of freedom. I learned that from Timothy Snyder, author of, among other accounts of our shared histories on planet Earth, On Tyranny and On Freedom.
Iain McGilchrist, whose rigorous, groundbreaking analysis of how brains work shows us how relationality, reciprocity, integration, and balance work in our lives and the lives of our ancestors, makes a huge amount of room for the unpredictable. The point being, McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things, that his book about the brain, “is about the nature of reality. It’s about how we are equipped by our brains to try to understand it, and what we can learn from that…It attempts, consequently, to give an account of reality that seems truer to the evidence than the one to which we have long been accustomed; one that is far-reaching in its scope, and consistent across the realms of contemporary neurology, philosophy and physics.” In McGilchrist’s view, he gives us an “account of who we are, on which nothing less than our future depends.”
“Every animal,” McGilchrist writes, “in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten.” One eye on the food. The other attentive eye on roaming predators.
That is the situation we are in now. There are predators surrounding us. We’re just trying to cook dinner.
Flaked salt. Chili flakes. A pinch of sugar. Olive oil. 225-degree oven. Leaves of the tomatoes? They are, wrote Neruda, stars of the summer night.Post a photo of a dinner you’re making, and a photo that represents today’s Vote-a-Rama.
Today, as the Trump government attempts to wrest total power in the guise of One Big Beautiful Bill, this very day, on the day of the vote, we must focus precise attention on what the Trump government is doing so we know where the danger lies. For the record, Republicans are PRO: kicking millions off of Medicaid, hospital closures, gutting SNAP, slashing clean energy programs, and huge tax breaks for the ultra-rich.
At the same time, we must be “crucially open to the appearance of the utterly unfamiliar—whatever may exist in the world of which [we] have no previous knowledge.”
Why? Because that new information could be the gold. I return to the meaning of hold space. I return to the ancient understanding of what may yet come.
We do not know what will show up next. Hold space. Look for predators. Look around you. Get new information. Hold the grief. Look for the gold. Be present for the gold that will surely come.
O beautiful for spacious skies, for juniper growing tall.–––––
Notes
Stephen Ellcock, master curator! IG: @stephenellcock FB: /stephen.ellcock