Tikkun Olam תיקון עולם

I’ve been silent. Hiding. Avoiding the truth.

As someone who normally feels very comfortable with words, I’ve had none lately. No words for myself, no words to help others. I wondered why I’ve been actively suppressing... burying myself under shitty tv and unhealthy choices… actively trying to hide myself- from myself. Stirring up a dust cloud of my own confusion, and then afraid to move away from the eye of the storm. There are days when I’m so hopeful for our future, and then there are days when really I just don’t know. So instead of trying to understand, I choose (yes choose) to stand in darkness. Instead of standing under my potential, acknowledging my part to play, I blow out the fire that allows me to have vision. I put out flames that stoke my passion, turn off lights that have lit the path before me. Suddenly, but not so suddenly, I am lost with no foreseeable future.

Is that what I’m here for? To hide behind bullshit and suppress my consciousness to static noice, just so I don’t make any waves? Each new piece of news I hear these days, hits me like a pile of bricks. Sends charges into my life: both positive and negative, hopeful and destructive. I call myself an advocate, but lately I’ve made active choices not to know, not to deal, not to address. I’ve made choices to suppress. Each time I don’t react, each time I ignore what’s happening in my life, in our world: I am making a CHOICE to be swept into a reality that I did not choose to be a part of.

Each day we make a choice: to listen, to hear, to know and see the truth. Each day we must decide what we stand for, what we believe in, what we are here to do. Tikkun Olam, or תיקון עולם in Hebrew, is a teaching of life from Jewish mystics advising us of our duty to create harmony. Advocating that we are each born into a broken world in order to repair it: to leave things better than it was before we came. If you left this planet now would you know, in all absolution, that you did the best you could do? Not just for the trajectory of your own minute life, but for the whole course of humanity’s story? Did you give back to this planet in more ways than she gave to you? Did you leave this place: your lineage, your people, your land; better than you found it?

Being silent is crippling. It is a disease spreading like wildfire to keep things (our earth, our communities, our humanity) stagnant, stale, suppressed, and morbid. Keeping all of us on the brink of mortality. Our planet crying out for attention, our youth in constant fear for their lives, our women disconnected from the LIFE GIVING power of our bodies because we are told they don’t belong to us. The colorful kaleidoscope of human citizens is being dulled into a grey monotony of singularity. What is happening in our country is NOT normal, it is not just, and it is absolutely not okay. We can not continue this way, or we will not continue in any way.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know that each of us has at least one. One way in which we are each here to make this world better for us all. One thing we can do to make waves. Let us use our voices, our gifts, our art, our connectivity to CHANGE SHIT UP. This is one act. It will take so many more from me… from you… from them. But let us be loud enough for them to hear us, in whatever way you choose to express.

Make sure you are felt. Make sure you are seen, Make sure you are known.

When that news hits you like a pile of bricks, when you feel that charge, do something with that energy. Do something, anything, about it. That is the act of Tukkan Olam. To not hide from our emotions, suppress our feelings, or doubt our beliefs about the way our world should be. Instead we use this wisdom to find meaning, and become a creator of our world instead of just a participant of it. Instead of just its prisoner.

Be loud. Be visible. Be truth. Stare them right in the face with it.