A sign from Mother Nature
Back to the tiny sketch pad. Again, my pencil is just sharp enough. It is a little after 6:00 AM. The bedroom curtains are open and there are the early indications of dawn. I started this on New Year’s Eve and finished it a few days later.
I had every intention of writing on New Year’s Day. The past five years, which have included a historic presidential election, an awakening and reckoning of the origins of this set of federated states built on stolen land and stolen and broken bodies, a mythical history filled with lies and half-truths written to perpetuate a belief system that denies the humanity of whole groups of people, and a global pandemic, for good measure. suggested that a profound manifesto seemed apropos. This is what my brain said. That is what the system says.
And then on New Year’s Eve, I was awakened by an earthquake off the coast. It was just enough (3.7 magnitude) to shake the house and bed - the shock of it reconnecting my mind, body and heart, all of which were now waiting to see what was coming next.
If you have not been through an earthquake, it is not the first shake that gets you. Although unsettling, it is the waiting that gets you. Waiting to see if Mother Nature was just blowing off some steam or if she is just getting started. She was done it seems, but the message was received, as was the bodily response so many of us have felt over the last couple weeks, months, years: be alert, be afraid, be ready to respond at any and all times, even before you have had the time and space to process what has happened.
And so, taking in that moment and lesson with the earth-shaking beneath me, I opted to let the day be, and me in it, in whatever way that manifested. Without needing to write. Without needing to figure out how to performatively say what we all know to be true.
It was the right move.
Hello, 2021. Bring it.
About The Author:
Jara Dean-Coffey (jdc) is Founder and Director of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative and the Founder of Luminare Group. For the past twenty-five years, she has partnered with clients and colleagues to elevate their collective understanding of the relationship between values, context, strategy and evaluation and shifting our practices so that they are more fully in service of equity. For more about musings + machinations click here.
