For all the civic unrest and shadows of our culture unfolding right now, I offer these words so that you may paint a new canvas of belonging from the brain in your heart, instead of just the mind inside your head.
The Color of Belonging
by Astara
The canvas of belonging
in our culture
is painted with invisible ink.
We squint to find a key, cue,
or pattern
for how to belong
and where we belong.
Like so many spies and politicians,
we paint belonging in this world
with unseen motivations
built from the brain’s hemispheres
creating and measuring, divvying up
the have’s from the have-not’s,
us and them,
you and me.
The automatic pilot of humanity’s mind
charts belonging in straight lines
and over-simplified colors,
distilling, excluding, dividing.
We are greedy because our mind has convinced us
there is never enough.
Society’s paintbrush overlays skin color
as a measure of worth.
Drawing with bias
we deny the truth of our shared DNA
so long
we believe the lie.
The connected bio-diverse truth of what we are
waits patiently behind the illusion
of racism and prejudice
like a seed beneath the soil.
Like the heart beating inside our chest.
Today I take the old canvas of separation
and paint over the limited hues
drawn by my parents, teachers, government,
and the sparse spectrum of my divided brain.
I paint colorful notes for my inner judge
tinting bright permission slips to my mind police
on behalf of the uprising of my heart and gut.
Bold tones take up more real estate
washing, revealing centuries of hidden ink.
Life’s palette is infinitely colorful.
I dip into my own vastness
and dab, feather, swirl
joy and sorrow,
courage and fear,
connection and separation,
acceptance and resistance,
peace and violence,
forgiveness and hatred
onto my canvas.
All these colors and more lie within me
and you.
Dissonance and chaos are the boldest colors of all
and our best teachers.
Such honest paint reveals
where the absence of justice
was really the absence of love.
If we are willing,
identity gives way to being
and we stop painting lies.
To no longer let an outworn
and outmoded personality
draw such stark illusions of another.
I
we
you
stare at the visible and invisible stains
of slavery and racism
misogyny and homophobia
built on the illusion that
we could ever profit off of someone else
that we could generate safety on this planet
through rejection of diversity.
How do we treat others?
There are no others.
And diversity is nature’s secret.
What is the color of accountability?
The tone of forgiveness?
The palette of humility?
My heart paints a new canvas
washed with shades of melanin
the black of those who came before,
before his-story decided against it.
The brown of those whose land we took
before we knew how to be accountable
and still have yet to be.
What is the color of my denied Jewish ancestry
of the suppressed feminine
persecuted for centuries yet now just a tint
in the spectrum of white privilege?
For over four hundred years
haunting canvasses
litter our cotton fields and railroad tracks,
factories and buildings.
The dark art of slavery is still
painted in the penitentiary
as men and women cower
inside the 13th amendment’s small print.
What is the color
for slavery’s secret even now
within cubicles, cars and houses?
No longer only the dark skinned,
only the impoverished, the persecuted and colonized.
This day give me my daily bread,
shiny car, voice activated everything.
All consumers are enslaved
yet they do not know it.
Every shade of color and gender
has become the jail and the jailer
imprisoned and imprisoning
inside legacies of narrow ignorance
keeping the slick machinery of fear and separation alive.
Hard workers and sweat labor perpetuates old empires
in corporation’s clothing
out of necessity.
All for the fearful mistaken greed of the mind.
Today I paint carefully the shining gold key
I toss at the feet of any who cross my path
to unlock their heart’s door
where belonging first colors their world.
Will they use the key?
Will they unlock their mind?
Will they open the door of their heart?
How do you paint others?
There are no others.
Diversity is nature’s inheritance
painting the gold of the sun at the horizon
elongating shadows
before us and inside of us.
Paint the blue of a darkening sky
above fires in the streets
above the beige, gold, brown, and black fists raised in the air
even as somewhere
the words “I can’t breathe” still echoes
against the dark asphalt.
A history of othering
and humanity still only sees a stark canvas
painted by the same splash of red
that pulses inside the veins of every human
regardless of their skin tone.
Waiting for the white of a waxing moon rising
above newly imposed curfews in cities
as black silhouettes what matters.
Can we keep the red beneath skin
this time?
The unbiased night waits for every color imaginable
as color disappears in the embrace of its restful dark.
The heart paints the paradox of self and other
in separate bodies yet one.
The heart knows what the mind forgets:
when we hurt another
we hurt ourselves.
The life inside me now paints and paints.
Where there were mute tones
complicit to the lies of humanity’s mind,
there is a blending of colors.
An awareness of other,
is awareness of self.
All of experience
even the chaos, the rage, the reckoning
emerges in its right season
as love’s best teacher.
Every hue belongs.
Awareness is the paint brush
and paradox is the canvas
with room for all of us.
Me and you and the whole world
colored side by side
as my little small mind
that still fears the stillness,
the unknown,
and the approaching black blue night
belongs too.
Learn more about Othering and Belonging and Inner Bonding.
