Like many people, the end of the year is a time when I think back on the previous twelve months, taking stock, and remembering the good things that happened and the challenges I’ve overcome. In our previous life on the island, it was also a time of busyness and increased intensity with our work. The heightened level of activity, both in our personal sphere and on the island itself, meant we often needed to let off steam around the holidays in order to make it through. When you work hard, you play hard (sometimes harder) and that maxim rang true for us for many years.
The 2022 year end was a bit different. The type of work we’ve been doing remains physical, but not as mentally or emotionally challenging as constant interfacing with spoiled and demanding clients. The year end felt, in many ways, anticlimactic. We did a thousand beautiful things during our travels, saw so many new and breathtaking sights, had novel and inspiring experiences, yet there we were, slugging through the cold dark days of December, caulking baseboards and scraping old paint from 90-year old walls. We’d hoped to be in our prospective new home by now and to have something to show for twelve months trying to conceive. Some days it all felt a bit glum.
Being back in a part of the Midwest that holds the gray hand of winter from November until sometime in March, with deep overcast skies and a lot of lake effect snow has not been the most joyful of experiences—though the snow has been conspicuously missing this winter. The days are just as dark and monotonous as I remember from when I lived here as a teenager, many years ago. In the past two weeks we’ve seen the sun less than a handful of times. Like plants, we are fading from lack of light. Goya looks at us beseechingly, wondering what we’re still doing here at all.
Both rehabs are done at last, and the first one is rented, the tenants thrilled with the stained hardwood floors and brand new kitchen and bathroom. They’re an older couple and have allocated the three bedrooms into one shared room, and separate his & hers—for when they need a break. They’ve got things figured out.
In December, the holidays had me reflecting on connections lost, or maintained, or renewed. On the people who marked time with me and with us this past year. On those who didn’t. I thought a lot about what it means to maintain connection across time and distance, on what it costs, on what it requires of us, on what it takes to let people go. In the past three years, it has seemed like everything became a reason, or a justification for severance. After nearly three years of societal shredding, and many years of political division before this, on many days it seems like we’ve lost the ability to make space for each other. It’s almost as if we’re losing our desire to do so. The past three years especially have taught us, in painful installments, the limits to our love.
During a recent conversation with one of our tenants who is an intensive care nurse, she told me she left her job when Covid hit, too scared to be confronted with patients who might transmit the pathogen. She told me point blank, “I was a coward.” I responded gently that the past three years have revealed to us many things about ourselves, and while they might be unpleasant, it is always better to know oneself. Our personal responses to the Covid mess taught us how we fold or rebel under pressure. How we exclude or speak out when pitted against forces beyond our control. How we pretend or revile. How we castigate or stay silent. What we censor and the things we accept or justify. We learned especially what kinds of stories we tell ourselves to make it all more bearable.
Not only did the Covid crisis reveal us to ourselves, it revealed us to each other, and in many of our relationships, that has made it difficult to move on without a certain tension. Now, in trying to forge our way beyond these dark times, we don’t know what to do with these new and uncomfortable truths about ourselves, or about the fragility of our relationships with those who made different choices. Instead of addressing this new knowledge, we’re faking it, hoping for a magical return of something more authentic.
Facing our shortcomings takes courage, and we don’t always feel we have the strength to change course, or admit to poor judgement, even if the payoff is more authenticity, better self-knowledge, and release from the burdens of pretense and self-deceit. Although I believe our mission here on earth is Love, I cannot say that I always act in the spirit of that love. Sometimes the anger is just too big. I have spent much of the past year working through my feelings about the whole Covid mess. So much has been stolen from us, so many lives and bonds destroyed. Our authorities have lied and misled and manipulated to such extremes. Many days I find myself still baffled by it all, but I am trying to let the anger teach me what it must about letting go and accepting that the world is not as I imagined.
There is so much to work through and many of our communities have become too fractured to do this work together. I’m not sure how we get out of this unless we become more willing to confront the truth head on. I believe we have a sacred duty to navigate the world with integrity and honesty. That by doing so we can expand our conscious understanding of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. It can be a terrible struggle. How is it possible to live and learn and love from a place of integrity and radical honesty when there is disagreement about how that love should inspire us to behave?
2022 was a year of extensive learning. Of diving deeply into subjects I previously knew nothing about, or took at face value. Of looking at how large and powerful forces move through the world, pitting people against each other with the sole intent of consolidating more power and more money into a few grasping hands. I have learned about the history of vaccines and how they are developed and evaluated. I have learned that their benefits are consistently exaggerated with the same false “safe and effective” mantra we’ve heard ad nauseum for the past three years. I’ve also learned about the injured, the giant unheard masses of them, and about the institutional gaslighting they face as they try to find help with their vaccine induced injuries. The time of Covid revealed this, too.1
A friend recently told me I am too obsessed with the story of Covid and the vaccines because I keep advocating for investigation and accountability. She says the system is corrupt, we all know this, and that I should move on. I think that attitude is one of the ways we abstract the reality of mass suffering and excuse ourselves from taking action for change. The problem is too big, we feel too small and powerless, so best to just live our lives quietly, in our own little corners, and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. I told my friend that at last count, just listing people I knew personally, there were 19 people in my life who have been injured by the Covid injectable products. That number could be higher, who knows? It’s a very un PC topic, and many people won’t engage, examine, or acknowledge the possibility that these products may be negatively impacting their health. They’d rather call it by another name.
How can I stay silent in the face of that? How can I say to these 19 people I know and love that they deserve to be set aside, with no help, with no recognition, and without recourse because that’s easier or more comfortable for everyone else? There is help to be found for those who are looking, but it has taking people speaking up for that need to even be acknowledged. There are also many people opting out of the existing structures and building something else, something new, something more aligned with our hearts and the sacred bonds that connect us all. It takes courage and integrity and compassion for the lived experiences of others to withstand the the forces that would drive us towards fear, darkness, separation, and abject obedience. It is not enough to have good intentions, or to defer to experts, we have to be responsible for ourselves and become the vessels through which we conjure a different relationship with the world. Though the saying tells us that ignorance is bliss, I’ve found that ignorance is simply another word for the abdication of power over our own lives.
When we deny or ignore knowledge and information, we live in constant fear that we’ll be confronted with the falsity of our beliefs. We feel threatened, so we develop a variety of strategies to resist all information that would challenge us to think beyond our comfort zone. Conversely, when we separate our selves from our beliefs, when we accept that we know much less than we think we know, when we exit the existing frameworks, and approach the world with true curiosity, it offers itself to us as limitless potential. When we learn to question our assumptions, regardless of the discomfort or the implications for our sense of self, when we accept any new information as potentially true, the world expands in ways we could not have previously imagined.
I have known nothing more liberating than learning to come at the world with a true thirst for learning rather than in search of confirmation of belief. If we are to heal the rifts and the social damage done in the name of public health in the past three years, we must regain our insatiable childlike curiosity about the world and return the cleansing power of truth to our hearts. We must bring that power back into our relationships and remember that love without truth is fragile as a ghost
Let us have the courage to live from a place truth, love, and integrity. Let us hold accountable those who seek to keep us in the grip of fear. Let us strip the power of control from those who have every incentive to lie and manipulate us to achieve their own ends. Let us hold and guide each other with curiosity, with kindness, and with an unwavering dedication to seeking out the truth.
With Love.
Many books, articles, research papers, and films have been written and made on this topic. Learnibout the other side of vaccine history has changed me deeply. I encourage everyone to dig beyond the platitudes so often used to quiet the questioners and skeptics. The reality is so much darker and more disconcerting than we are led to believe, and our health is much the worse for that deceit.
🥰😇🥰
Love IS the answer.
I know that you know that there are many ways to reverse the vacciné damage.
It's up to them to take the steps.
Vaers reports can be done by.an individual. It's time consuming but free. Etc...
Love you Big Girl. ❤❤❤