Hugs Now; Hugs Later: Flowers Never

Your flowers are beautiful, but they will die just like you and I. What will live forever, in every dimension, is how we show up for each other in the present…. I thought about this then I watched Eldra Jacks III talk about healing circles in prison.

His humanity resonated with me, it was familiar, and the applause he got at one point made me uncomfortable. We should acknowledge and uplift each other, but it’s not about giving and receiving flowers. The true value of expressing your appreciation for people, before you lose them, is the ability to be together in that moment. There is an audience for his story, for our story, and our power lies there, in our ability to share. The individual ripple effects of that power are significant–but not the point. They are not where the surface has been disrupted, and we must follow that trajectory because it is our entry point into what lies beneath the surface. We go as deep as our authenticity allows. Our authentic selves are like stones. Our social selves, determined by arbitrary divisions of power and oppressive expressions of force, are riddled with air pockets. The weight of one’s suffering may cause them to go under, but if they are not capable of surrendering–they go down gasping for breath. That sink can be deadly, the death symbolic and cyclical.