Audacity

I really like words. Not fancy vocab words, or Latin root words, or mono-syllabic words, necessarily. For me, the words I feel particularly drawn to are the ones that feel like they hit the spot!

You know what I mean. Something about the look, the sound, or the combination of the two just feels right – in your mouth, in your brain, even (when you’re lucky) throughout your entire nervous system.

This reaction is pulled out of me from time to time with new words (new-to-me words, I should specify). Words like:

- Abattoir (noun, British: a slaughterhouse)

- Anachronistic (noun: conspicuously old-fashioned) or

- Attenuate (verb: reduce the force, effect, or value of)

I love the feel of these words, so now that I’m aware they exist, I am on the lookout for them and ready to appreciate them in a song lyric, a book, or anywhere else they cross my transom.

A word, already in my lexicon, hit me hard last night.

Audacity.

I was sitting in my back porch, minding my own damn business ;) I was listening to/watching a podcast and audacity came up in their conversation.

Immediately, I was captured by a memory and transported back to a time in San Francisco when I was the field director at Equality California and we regularly partnered with the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Walking into a joint event one evening, I was wandering through the venue, reading the placards and signage and various handouts strewn around the tables that were set up. NCLR’s tag line damn near knocked me out:

“The audacity to fight for justice, the perseverance to win.”

If I’m remembering correctly, the lettering was in red; it was printed on a white background.

“The audacity to fight for justice, the perseverance to win.”

Damn, that’s good.

For years and years, this pile of lawyerly lesbians had been working to protect and defend LGBTQ people in both lower and higher courts. They stood up to bullies. They organized plaintiffs and went about the complex and laborious business of crafting and executing strategies to change case law so we can all live freely.

Many of these leaders came up and of age organizing for change in the 1980s and 1990s – the height of and fallout from the AIDS pandemic. These queer women, in particular, were fucking tough. They had sat with the dying, took to the streets, and also embarked on the hard and ever-lasting inner work required to heal from trauma after trauma.

“The audacity to fight for justice, the perseverance to win.”

I think the word “audacity” hit me again last night because, to me, it feels like an incredibly audacious proposition to name and claim your desire and commitment to a better future.

This feels especially true if and when the moment you’re currently trying to navigate feels more like being trapped in a hot-as-hell tumble dryer. You’re getting bounced around. It’s hard to breathe. And the door is shut and locked until this cycle is mercilessly over.

Get-me-outta-here!

Currently, some of us are feeling most activated by the escalating global violence. Some of us are concerned and confused about what in the hell will happen next for America (no matter who wins and loses the elections this November). And for others of us, the current battle is mostly internal. We’re working on our healing. We are trying to excavate residue we’ve been carrying that sits like poison in our bones.

God bless us.

I mean, honestly. It’s a miracle any of us who are alive, alert, and awake to our individual and shared realities are even standing. We’re washing. We’re driving. We’re going to and from work. And we’re taking care of pets and parents.

We’re killing it, actually ;)

NCLR had picked their tag line many years before Barack Obama gave his infamous 2004 DNC speech, which he eventually wrapped into his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Both NCLR’s tag line and Obama’s tying of audacity to hope ring of a kind of desire and tender longing. Dr. Brené Brown made certain to research and then highlight some related concepts in her most recent book, “Atlas of the Heart.”

Wisely, Brown waits until page 202 of the book to delve into the sweet emotions – it takes a bit to warm up and trust any of the warm fuzzy feelings (in my experience, at least).

On page 204, Brown shares that joy is “characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.”

On page 215 Brown goes on to describe, in detail, the flip side of the joy coin – “foreboding joy.” It’s the panic we start to experience when something good is happening and we’ve been alive long enough to know that horrific things happen, too. Hence, we brace ourselves for whatever scary shit is probably lurking around the next corner.

It’s exhausting. It’s sad. And it’s also totally understandable. Hypervigilance that has been well-earned.

Brown explains that the experience of “dress-rehearsing tragedy” and “foreboding joy” is nearly universal.

Daring to dream (audacity!) is often sweet, and child-like. It’s beautiful! Our near automatic reactivity can also make daring to dream feel like a dumb, dangerous pipe dream of a move.

Thank God, through Brown’s research, she learned that there is something we can do to build up our own ability and tolerance to experience flashes of joy, even in the midst of an often dangerous and disappointing human experience.

“In our research we found that everyone who showed a deep capacity for joy had one thing in common: They practiced gratitude.

In the midst of joy, there’s often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability.

Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the worst-case scenario, the people who lean into joy use the quiver as a reminder to practice gratitude.”

I was spending time with my book group last Friday and felt immense gratitude to be among these other women authors, each of us trying to birth something out into the wider world. It’s daunting. It’s disorienting. And over the course of the hours we spent together, there was also laughter.

This week marks the Equinox. And I understand that this is a time period that reminds us of balance. Half day. Half night. Half dark. Half light. Warm in the sun. Cool in the shade.

All the all.

It is audacious, in my opinion, to hope, to pray, to consciously connect to desire for more goodness. More connection. More love. More healing.

So even though my book continues to get written without a clear title to harness the whole thing together, I am feeling proud and tender about the audacious claim I am trying hard to make:

(brace yourselves for all caps for just a moment)

WE - DO - NOT – HAVE – TO - LIVE – LIKE - THIS!

Our work lives don’t have to feel oppressive. Our bodies don’t have to be collateral damage to our pursuits. And the centuries of mean-spirited cruelty and one-upmanship can all fucking stop.

I’m serious.

Humans made the problem. Humans can clean it back up.

No more racism. No more sexism. No more ableism.

None of it. Just love. Just support. Just understanding. And tethers that mean we don’t have to go it alone.

In writing, whenever I say shit like this, I feel like it reads so stupid. I envision the Vaseline-teethed high hair beauty contestant answering a final interview question in her bathing suit saying something akin to “I dream of world peace.”

But, rather than back up from what I believe, somewhere deep in my bones, I can try once again to just own it.

In moments, both unpredictable and fleeting, I can channel the audacity to hope for better and then buckle up and bust out my practices to engage in the tenacious work it’s gonna take to turn that dream into reality.

I hope that wherever you are when you read this, you are able to be gentle with yourself. When a still small voice, a call from your inner knowing, grasps your attention, love on her and reply with something like, “What an audacious notion! I sure hope you’re right. That would be so beautiful.”

Til next week,