Look.
My dreams command my full attention. The directors of sleep harness the undercurrent of urgency relentlessly whispering through my waking days and sculpt the unease into stunning blood-orange sunsets that melt into a collage of syrupy dreams.
Look.
I am in Marfa.
(I am always in Marfa, in daydreams mapping the future, in nostalgic retracing of memories.)
I am in Marfa and the sky is fire, and the overwhelming beauty simultaneously frightens and mesmerizes.
Is the sun setting or is it rising?
The sky erupts, splits in two, a Salvador Dali painting erupting and startling me wide-awake.
There’s a budding of sweat not summoned by the Texas summer, not even by that fearsome blaze of a dream-spun sun, but by a restless burn of questions that are excruciatingly loud at 3am.
What am I doing with my life? How am I of service?
In darkness, I can see the questions spelling themselves out, questions I am so intimately familiar with they might as well be etched into my bones.
There is no adequate reply to satisfy the questions. These questions are destined to persistently course through my lifetime.
(I think we’re born with these questions, and because we are designed to expand, evolve, iterate again and again, the fleeting answers to the questions must shift, too.)
Action-oriented, I leap and race toward my dreams, my goals. But there’s a price in believing that any movement is progress. The price is energy exhausted in trying, pushing, forcing, and relearning what I already sensed to be true, and then stepping back to the reroute.
Now. I advocate for stillness. I pause with all my decisions. I breathe and trust my initial response, and then proceed.
In practicing the pause, I often find that I am still unclear, I do not know, and instead of analytically forging an answer, I now view the hesitancy as a grand, glowing cue to wait. Not all the information has been presented yet. There is a way of flowing that is ease-centric, and in the ease, there is a replenishment of energy in honoring the choice that aligns, brightens, and ignites.
And in this new practice of pausing, breathing, listening, acting only on the energized, intuited yes, I sense a heightened criticalness to these very familiar questions.
Is the sun setting or is the sun rising?
All actions, decisions, even the choice of thoughts, loom large in quivering potential to stay stuck in the ego-driven circles of judgment, separateness, hate, or lift consciousness through fierce empathy, resilient advocacy, an owning and healing of wounds so the sting of the charge can be cleansed and the power of love can filter in.
As I move through bathtub summer days, as dreams of sunsets or sunrises stream through my nights, I actively and urgently show up. I feel like this is my way of service, and then, there’s a shimmering emergence of a volunteer opportunity.
Instant, wildly enthusiastic YES.
I rush into the YES of helping at a literacy and nutrition camp for moms and kids.
The second week, I sport an Eric Carle tee, a fashion nod to the celebratory read of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and perform the caterpillar’s quest of eating his way to butterfly rest. I skip to assist the pre-school teachers in singing songs in Spanish about ingredients for vegetable soup. I unpack lunches of rice and beans, wheat sandwiches with generous fillings of egg and ham, and pour water into little cups and announce in Spanglish, “Who wants agua?”
On the days that I volunteer with the littles, the persistent questions soften. I don’t wake up at 3am.
I notice the shift in energy. I take note. I listen. I look.
“¡Mira!”
“Look!”
He presents neon orange Play-Doh sculpted into a square.
“¡Mira!”
Dance moves frozen when the song pauses.
“¡Mira!”
The paper butterfly gleams in the waxy Crayola sheen of purples, blues, and greens.
¡Mira!
The little one in tears after his mother leaves. The volunteers and the teachers hurry to his side to comfort with goldfish, puppets, gentle hugs. His crying slows. If he wants to be held, he will be swiftly picked up and cradled. This camp is only for an hour. His mother sits in a classroom with other mothers engaged in cooking demos on proper nutrition. She is a classroom away. We tell him a promise that is true – he’ll be reunited with his mother so soon.
“¡Mira!”
The two-year-old girl in a convulsions of tears. She wears a red jacket the color of the sun in my dreams. I first hear her story as I busy myself around the kitchen, making coffee, guzzling hot water and lemon, and listening to NPR. Her story shortens my breath, forces me stop, to feel the unfathomable horror of her reality, the reality of too many families at our border, which is just hours away from me. We are as close as air. I cry at the sink. Press coffee grind fingertips to my chest because we have to feel this. To not feel this would deny her.
That sun is setting.
“¡Mira!”
I look around at the crowded volunteer orientation for the Refugee Services of Texas . I watch the charged rising of arms shooting up to answer that they are here because of desperately wanting to do something after hearing the news about the separation of families at the border.
A seriousness permeates the twinkle lit room. I cringe at the caustic questions pressed toward the volunteer coordinator. After a while, people stop raising their hands and start shouting out for clarifications about the numbers of families allowed in the US under the current administration’s travel ban, and demanding repeats on exactly how the nonprofit serves families.
Aren’t we all here, I think, because we care and want to help? And how did the volunteer coordinator, who arranges teams of people to greet families flying in from Afghanistan at the airport, somehow become a target for heated discharge over the political situation?
She’s not the problem, she’s offering a solution.
Afterward, I look for an opportunity to tell her she did well.
“People feel helpless and they are angry, and they haven’t found an outlet, yet.” Her intelligent kindness endears me to spill out my answers to those questions that wake me up at 3am. I confess that I feel like I am talking a lot about myself, but I’m passionate, and I want to serve, and she listens in a way that cues that I am safe to speak, and I share that I teach yoga, that I could teach a class as a fundraiser for their cause, and I also even tell out-loud my dream.
“¡Mira!”
The vacant chair beside the kind woman who spontaneously offered to pay for my background check fee. I could sneak to the back and look at my phone, or I could sit by her, and I decide the latter, and strike up a conversation. Within the first few minutes, she mentions she’s an improviser, and the synchronicity of sitting beside an Austin-seasoned improviser at this event ignites a concentration of all my energy toward her, toward how this conversation unfolds. Goosebumps shiver up my arm compelling me to share that the reason I stepped into improv was because of an NPR article on German dating coach who leads improv classes for refugees. And she responds with goosebumps and says she knows people who would do that in a heartbeat. And we both do a double-take and agree to meet for lunch.
¡Mira!
A sunset lush in pinks and deepening blues painting the evening drive back home. I roll down the windows, intoxicated by the beauty of a sky refreshed from a heavy rain, a cry.
A sunset similar to my dreams in vividness, but any unease dissolves into quiet streets that in the summer show me in quick glimpses what Austin was like as a small town before the boom, before the millions, the millions like me, excited and nervous, eager and rushing for a lifestyle, a fresh start, an artistic, inclusive, free-to-be-you vibe.
I drive on those summer sleepy streets on an energized high from the volunteer orientation, from making connections, and talking dreams, and moving forward to taking action in my home community.
“Hello!”
Look. There are two girls waving from a passing car. They are shouting out hellos into the evening air. The happy eagerness they exude flashes me back to being twelve and questioning the kindness of humanity I would randomly smile at people and make note of who smiled back. I remember…not many.
I smile wide, because this is what I can do, in my here and in my now, I can wave and sing a hello back, and it’s a hello for them, and a hello and I see you, too, to the families sharing this sunset, too.
I watch as they drive away, tiny hands outstretched, surfing in the currents of the wind. I hope others echo back a hello.
And as I continue home, I take comfort in the sunset, because this evening I sat in a room of people in motion to keep the narrative moving forward to justice. We are active in answering the questions. And this hope moves me forward into this sunset, because I have an action-plan for my tomorrow, for how to be of service, so let the sun fade. I know the sun will rise.