an animal

on loving what we love.

CW: Suicidal ideation

9.12.24

I love you. I care so much about life, your life. I care so deeply about creation, about humanity, about other-than-human beings, about this jewel of a living, breathing planet. And, because I care so deeply about these things, I care less and less each day about the things that used to matter so much. Ambitions, goals, the things that I was told I was supposed to want, the things that I was told I was supposed to have by now as a woman in her middle age. My detachment leaves me wondering what my life is without this, without the drive for more. All I can bring myself to care about is loving you, loving us, loving our planet, loving life so much that I’m motivated by nothing but that. I'm sitting with the grief of the great big lie into which I bought – the lie that told me that the measure of my life is found in what I do or don't do, what I have or don't have. I feel the truth now, which is that we're here just to be here.

I love gazing at flocks of birds outside of my windows. Especially the geese. I love them simply because they exist. They just fly. And sometimes, when they're not flying, they just perch on something and sit. And sometimes, if they see something that looks yummy, they just swoop to go after it. And that's it. That’s what they're here to do. They're just here to be birds.

The lie that we were told is that we aren’t here to just be humans, to just be in the same way that birds just are and trees just are. We have survived unfathomable horrors under a global system of exploitation and hierarchy, of intentionally fabricated scarcity. Too many of us have not survived. Those of us who are still here are told that our right to exist relies on our capacity to produce, and our enjoyment of existence relies on our capacity to consume. We’re told that our production and consumption are the markers of what it means to be a human who lived a life.

I remember who I was before I recognized this lie as such. I suffered because I tried so hard to do everything I was taught to do in order to win this game. Even as a child, especially as a child, I never learned how to just exist. I didn't get to just be. I couldn’t learn what I loved, because all of my time had to be accounted for with something productive. I did all the right things, checked every box that I was supposed to check. And I was sick, exhausted, half-alive, hating myself. It didn't matter how many things I accomplished or accumulated. None of that mattered more than how loudly my body screamed at me, I am not here for this. Capitalism conditions us to praise people for their ability to keep going, even when they are sick and exhausted and half alive and hating themselves. We tell each other that ignoring and numbing our bodies in order to continue to produce is a positive trait. And we tell Black women that this is what makes us magical, that this “strength” is our superpower, that what we produce in spite of our exhaustion, illness, and misery is the thing that gives us value.

My desire to do less and be more finds me in a state that is both strange and familiar. I do things each day – work things, creative things, social things, the things necessary to reproduce my life. I do these things while experiencing the requisite human waves of emotion along the way. But there’s a remove, a muted nature to my doing. All of my doing feels fake. And I have to pretend that I believe it’s real.

I’ve been here before, in that place where everything feels fake. I was a teenager the first time I wanted to die. I’ve experienced suicidal ideation multiple times since then, most recently at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Those of us who have been there, we know this feeling. Nothing matters, nothing is real, nothing I do changes anything, everything is going to be terrible always, I'm going to be terrible always, why stick around for the play by play if I already know the outcome of the game? And the outcome of the game is that I lose, we lose, humanity loses, the planet loses. Is it any wonder that so many of us don’t want to live when this - hierarchy, exploitation, false scarcity, the imperative to play a losing game - is all we know of life?

I’ve been here before, but this time it feels different. I feel the same degree of detachment now that I’ve felt when I was suicidal. But I don’t want to die. I fervently want all of us to live. I don’t want to die because my soul now remembers the other, crucial piece of truth that I’d forgotten. I came to Earth remembering that this is a game, and that the outcome is already done. But I forgot that the outcome is that we win. The outcome is humanity evolving, returning, remembering. The outcome is love. I don’t know how we get from now to the final whistle. I don't know all of the plays that happen in between. I don’t know what the final score will be. But I know that we win.

Remembering our win doesn’t mean that I care less about living. It means I care less about my production and consumption and more about loving you, loving us. More about being our win, embodying our win. Less about doing what I’m told, conforming to and pretending to believe in a dying and death-dealing construct of reality. More about being with people and creating moments in which we, collectively, witness and name the false for what it is. More about collectively rejecting the lie and returning to our bodies.

We are here to exist in a body. We are Existence, here to have the experience of remembering ourselves as that. I exist in a body in which healing and evolution are happening, on a planet that is healing and evolving, in communion with other beings who are healing and evolving. We are in process together, in that transition place, that meeting point where the beginning becomes the end and the end becomes the beginning. I know everything is changing, and I both do and don't know what that means, what that will look like, what the day to day, play by play of the external reality of that will look like. I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I’m trying to learn to be. To accept that I just am. To be that I just am in a body.

That's all the birds are doing.

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is a social media favorite. If you’re in the same corners of the internet that I am – where the deep feelers, the spiritual seekers, the sensitive souls hang out – you may have come across her reading this poem on your timeline. I first discovered and fell in love with Oliver over a decade ago, and it was these words that sealed the deal. I know now, remember now, what she meant when she wrote:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees 

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

The soft animal of that bird body loving what it loves, from moment to moment to moment. That is what that bird is here to be. And the same thing is true for you and me. I’m here to experience my being in this body based on what she loves. This is why remembering how to feel, remembering how to be in our bodies, listening to what our bodies are telling us and prioritizing that over what we're conditioned to believe we're supposed to produce or consume, is how we get free. This is why embodiment is our freedom. This is why embodiment is how we enact our liberation together.

You’ll notice that Mother Mary does not say, “let the soft animal of your body want what it wants, control what it controls, produce what it produces, consume what it consumes, accumulate what it accumulates.” No. Love what it loves, she says.

Capitalism alienates us from our bodies. It turns our signals of distress in response to a violent reality into sins for which we must atone. It turns our ignorance and suppression of our pain into virtues. Capitalism tells us to be good. Our bodies tell us to be love. We are here at this moment in human history to remember how to return to our bodies, and allow them to love what they love. And, in the absence of how we’ve been conditioned, I think our bodies would simply love each other, love this planet, love this life, love being.

What does my body love? What does your body love?

My body loves the way Alice Walker describes womanism - a term she coined in her 1983 non-fiction collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. It is rare to encounter a political framework defined by what we love, rather than solely by what we fight against. My body, like Walker’s, “loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually,” as she also “sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually” and remains “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” And both/neither, I add, and every body existing anywhere in between and outside of this construct.

My body, like Walker’s, “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.”

And now that I see the lie for what it is, now that I am in communion with others who reflect back to me that I was never at fault for wanting to die under a construct that dealt us and our planet nothing but death, my body, like Walker’s, is finally able to say that she “Loves herself. Regardless.”  

I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what's going to happen. I don’t even know in a way that I can prove that our evolution is as inevitable as it feels in my body. What I do know is that my body’s love for you leaves me no choice but to know that we will win. Because the soft animal of my body loves you so much that she doesn’t know how to continue to live otherwise.