The Last Thread

This is the moment when the old dream unwinds its last thread, finally letting go.

A dark sense of foreboding has been pecking away at me for months. Because it was so persistent, I felt like it must be something big. Maybe someone in my life will die (that could still happen), but it felt more like an important political figure, or maybe a terrorist attack on our soil. I couldn’t get a sense of what it would be, just that it was important and it involved death.

It was so constant, so annoying, I started waving it away like a fly.

I’ve always had a strong intuition, sometimes it’s so loud it breaks through the noise of daily life and I drop into that other, greater ocean of reality. This happened often when I was a child, saying out loud what was unsaid, seeing people’s inner worlds roll by like glowing clouds floating around them. As an adult it happens less, unless I am in distress, or those close to me are in danger. It’s not anything I try to control, I just make room for it when it’s here.

This recent, persistent looming sense of death was very non-specific, no real details given. I didn’t feel threatened, didn’t feel like the kids were in trouble. I just knew it would be important in some way. When something like that comes to me I often wrap it in a story that has nothing to do with what is really about to happen. The sky is falling Chicken Little!

Sometimes the sky does fall.

The deaths of young children in the recent Texas floods turned out to be the loss waiting to haunt me. It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. In a country that can produce a mass shooting like Uvalde every few years, the loss of dozens of children in one horrific incident is tragic, but not unheard of. Still, there is something so dark, so heavy about their loss.

I know it’s cliche, but it’s a turning point.

It took me a day or two to realize that nagging feeling of impending death was gone. Instead there is the sound of quiet water, the vision of wreckage, and the feeling of emptiness left by great loss. The invitation to mourn their loss, and perhaps a kind of final loss, hangs unavoidable around me.

Something deeper was washed away.

That bright, glowing future in which everyone would be safe, we all would be taken care of, prosperity would rest at our feet, is now just a memory. This is the moment when the old dream unwinds its last thread, finally letting go.

I know for many of you I must sound late to the party, maybe that's one of the downfalls of listening to your intuition so much. Intuitives (whether our intuitions are right or wrong) wind up waiting until the moment is “right”, until the big reveal is just about to happen, before we move forward. We want to be perched on the edge of that wave and ride it well.

People have been discussing the fall of empire, the end of the American dream for years if not decades. There are so many markers rational people can point to that clearly show decline. But for me, the loss of so many young children, in what must have felt like eternal moments of terror, might be the only marker heavy enough to end this story.

If we fail at caring for the most vulnerable among us, even the vulnerable of the most privileged among us, who can say we deserve the title of ‘civilization’ any more?

Pundits and news outlets waffle between a failure of preparedness, will of God, nobody could have predicted, etc etc. We’re not seriously talking about how we can solve this, stop it from happening again. We have surrendered our “can do” spirit to “thoughts and prayers.” The old guard has fallen, it can’t be taken seriously. This is what we have become: a parody of a nation.

It may take weeks, months or even years to really sink in. There is so much to grieve, this is just the beginning. Let the waters recede. The wreckage must settle before it can be realistically addressed.

What’s required now to begin a new weaving, for me at least, starts with holding each one of those children lost in the flood in my heart, allowing them to sink in deeply. Let them rest there, hold them there. I also invite in all of the children who have died in mass shootings over the last few decades, they have a home in my heart as well. The children who live on the edge of hunger each day, who live with parents who are addicts or alcoholics, they live in me too. All of the children of north, south and central America, in all of their beautiful colors and cultures, who suffer and struggle - they all have a home in my heart.

Whatever the chaos and conflict this great loss sparks, whatever challenges await us in the coming years, holding all of the children of the world in our hearts is a powerful foundation for weaving the next way forward. Be they Israeli or Palestinian, Latino, Anglo, black, white or Asian, we must hold all the children in our hearts and make a way forward for them, even as the threadbare remains of the old dream disappear.

As we mourn this great loss, let’s allow their light to materialize the threads that need to be born now. Let these new threads rest before us, until the time is right, to begin anew.

My intuition has calmed for now. I try not to shy away from the pictures of the many children swept away, or from the stories of how their bodies were recovered. I let the truth of what their lives might have been blow through me as I sit with the fallow place left behind.

New threads will form, in time, and we will weave.