Take a good look at yourself in the mirror. Wonder who you dare to be in this moment of mass alarm, canceled everything, communal seeking, social distancing, self-quarantine.
Remember being a young babe, 2005, studying Sanskrit. Studying Proto-Indo-European root words like rad-, which means root, which is where we get the words radish, and radical. To be radical—to be •a• radical—is to get to the root of it, the truth of it, to be unwilling to settle for what things seem to be on the surface. To be radical is to demand the real, the grit, the honest. To be a radical is to stand for truth, to be able to see unflinchingly, not just amidst family and friends, not just within your community, but also within yourself. Have you, ever in your life, given yourself radical love, approached the hallowed doors of your mind with total honesty?
Contemplate the difficulty here. Contemplate the ways in which you look away, you don’t want to see yourself, or others, those who don’t look like you, other roots in the soil that take distinct shape. Can you see who you are? Who you’ve become? What the ground where you’re planted, where you’re growing, has made of you? To get radical, to the root, the soil of your becoming must be tilled regularly. With compassion, with ruthless honesty, with a gathering of what makes you strong, and a release of what prevents growth.
Of course, every now and again, blight will threaten the strength of your root system. And you will remember you are nothing without the soil itself, the entire ecosystem you thrive in, that you cannot survive without acknowledging your interdependence as one tiny, perhaps memorable, part of the whole. It is the loam that teaches you to send tender shoots down into darkness. That demands you stand in the sun and see, in stark awe, what becomes of a world filled with those who choose to open their eyes to each other, to feel, to give, to be fully. Rooted. Radicals.
Look in the mirror today. I dare you. What do you see?
