When I was a kid we sometimes went swimming over at the neighbor’s pool, an above-ground number with a rickety ladder that wasn’t actually big enough to swim, but which allowed for games like Marco Polo, underwater handstands, and my favorite, making a whirlpool.
If you’ll recall, the way to make a whirlpool is to get a couple of kids to go around the pool in the same direction, faster and faster, until the water takes on a life of its own, eventually becoming a current strong enough that you can stop swimming and just float, carried along by your own wave.
I’ve been giving some thought to the world I currently inhabit, at a time that is undoubtedly a turning point, and I’ve been wondering: how can I be—not only helpful, not only available, but more fully myself? How can I show up?
This past week there’s been lots of talk about resistance, but I have set the idea of resistance aside. Not only because what we resist, persists (see: recent election), but because of what I know about the whirlpool.
When people move together in a single direction, it creates a wave that can ultimately carry us along. It takes some commitment at first: really? we’re just going around and around in circles here, but eventually the water we swim in begins to move with us, and then moves without us. We create a charge. We literally create a movement.
So I ask myself: what am I committed to creating? Which way do I want to move the water?
I want to put my energy into a world where humans can be fully ourselves: unique, emotional, unfettered creatives. A world where resources are shared equitably and managed sustainably. A world where we govern through consensus, where we consider the seventh generation, where we honor the Other before we rush into destruction. A world that’s encrusted with art. A world that’s alive with music and dancing. A world where we remember that the primary energy underlying everything is love.
In the current moment that world feels far away, but then I remember that the direction in which I move, matters.
Yesterday I got together with some of my favorite people for the quarterly event we call the Art Hodgepodge. We gather with piles of art supplies and spend the day just making stuff. In the process, we reconnect. We belly-laugh and share what’s going on with us. We swap supplies, skills, feedback. We talk through the big stuff and the small stuff while we paint, stitch, and monoprint. In the process, we’re creating one of those whirlpools.
It’s not marching in the streets or throwing ourselves in front of rubber bullets, but gatherings like this hold their own kind of power. This is the power of community, of solidarity. This is the networked connectedness that humans have been leveraging since we first wandered the plains, working together—not painfully, not to just grit through the next bitter day, but joyfully and expansively.
That is the energy I want to move in the world. If we’ve learned anything from the recent election (and we have, and we will learn much more) it’s that we can’t outsource human connection. We can’t give all our energy to a handful of people in a distant location that we will never meet, who will never drive by and check out our holiday lights, who aren’t going to drop off a freezer casserole when our life goes upside down. That kind of everyday kindness is the domain of the small group. The true community. The place where we are seen, we are known, and our strength has a place to land.
That is the wave I aim to create. I will keep moving in that direction. Around and around, if need be—but not alone. So many of us are now recommitting to the world we know we can create. Even now. Especially now. Together.