What can we offer this moment?
("Forget your perfect offerings")
What can we offer this moment?
This question has been stirring in me since my recent astrological reading with my beloved sister Katina Castillo of Celestial Revelations1. I had booked a session with her to read the birth chart of the institution where I work (UPEACE). Yes, even institutions and organizations have birth charts, based on the moment when they came into existence, and it can provide a fascinating look into the purpose and path of a place.
The story of the birth chart reading itself I will leave for another time. But the reading had messages and questions that I feel are relevant to all of us that I have continued to think about, which have continued to stir and stick in me. This is one of the things I love about astrology: it can help us see things a little differently, and offer us a fresh view of our lives. This was why I had booked the reading, to seek a different perspective on my workplace and my place in it.
The question that has continued to roil around my mind and heart since the reading is: what can we offer these times? What can we offer this moment?
This question brings to mind these Leonard Cohen lyrics, which have similarly been swirling in me lately:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen, Anthem
What can we offer this moment? Forget your perfect offerings.
I come back to these lines from Leonard Cohen often, and used them recently in the conclusion of an article I co-authored with my peace education students2. The lyrics are another reminder to me of the indispensable role that music (and art in general) plays in our lives. Lyrics can reach places that words alone cannot. Words connected to notes and melodies have a way of reaching through the cracks in our hearts and touching places that feel unreachable, perhaps places we didn’t know needed to be touched.
In the face of the immense tragedies and horrors of this moment, in Gaza and Sudan and the Congo and so many places, we might feel immobilized. Like what we are doing isn’t enough. Like what we are doing doesn’t matter, isn’t having an effect. Or that we are afraid of doing anything for fear of getting it wrong, of not doing it right.
Forget your perfect offerings. Sometimes we might be stifled or immobilized for fear that our offering will not be enough. That it won’t be right, correct. We might be afraid, amidst cancel culture, that we will be ostracized if we say the wrong thing.
And believe me, I feel this way, too. I make offerings (like this post) that I fear are woefully insufficient. I write to my political representatives every single day demanding a ceasefire3, and see them daily either doing nothing or making things worse. I make offerings that feel far from perfect.
And yet, I feel like they need doing. The words of Vannessa Machado de Oliveira and Dani D’Emilia echo in my mind: “Remember that our medicines are both indispensable and insufficient,” from their poem Co-sensing with radical tenderness (and a beautiful example of poetry as pedagogy, as resistance, as worldbuilding; I wrote more about this poem in a post a few months ago). Writing to my politicians feels absolutely necessary, a moral and civic duty when my government is providing the weapons being used in the genocide of Palestinian people, and it feels like far from enough.
Necessary, indispensable, but insufficient. Imperfect.
And yet, perhaps this is why I love the use of the word offering, especially letting go of the need for them to be perfect. Doing what we can and make it an offering, in all the little spheres of our lives, to try to make the world better - reduce suffering and stop harm and create more possibilities for love and justice- in the ways that we can, to heal and disrupt and subvert and create.
I have a practice of making offerings, of creating altars. When I am teaching, we always have a learning altar in the room (and the teaching itself is of course an offering). There are public altars like the tree altar. And now, one of my main sites of making offerings is the pedestal altar at the edge of the forest on campus. I make offerings to give back, to practice reciprocity, to speak to the world rather than about it4. Enchantable is an offering, my peace education classes are offerings. They are the best ways I know how to give what I can, in addition to giving in my relationships.
What can we offer this moment, these times?
I intentionally phrased this question as we rather than I or you, because I do think it is about us. It is about each of us doing our small part in the places we touch. We don’t have to do it alone. In fact, we are never truly doing it alone.
At the same time, there is a you in the we. So, dear reader, what can you offer these times? What can I offer these times? What can we, together, offer this moment, these times?
Because also we need all kinds of offerings. In the framing of peace studies5, we need to work for negative peace (stopping physical violence) and positive peace (the presence of love, justice, conditions for thriving). We need holding actions, structural change, and shifts in consciousness6. We need to hospice these system while we birth new ones, we need birth doulas and death doulas. Truth tellers and trust builders. We need resistance of these violent systems, dismantling them, stopping them from harming in every way we can (ceasefire now), while at the same time we need to plant seeds and live into the worlds that come next, which we have to practice now. We need art and creation and reminders that this world is as terrifically beautiful as it is horrifying, and that is something worth fighting for, dreaming for, remembering, cultivating. We need so many kinds of work, so many offerings. There is a place and role for each of us. We need all of us7.
Can we forget our perfect offerings, and just make them anyway?
This moment needs our offerings
our witnessing
our compassionate action
our reverence
our grace
our grief
our attention
our prayers
our creative lifeforce
our art, our music, our poetry, our dance,
our pain and joy
our sacred rage
our protest
our resistance
our love.
What can you offer this moment?
Recommended Reading
I would like to close with a small collection of some posts I have come across this week related to the importance of enchantment, magic, creativity, and art in these immensely challenging times, which have nourished me, and which I would like to recommend for your inspiration:
Cultivating Creativity and Resisting Despair on The Feelings Union by Lisa M. O’Neill
Why magic matters on The Clearing by Katherine May
Enchantment is resistance on The Art of Enchantment, with Dr. Sharon Blackie
The Role of the Artist by Yumi Sakugawa on Instagram:
May we meet this moment, and all the rest to come, with all the love and care and creativity we can offer.
You can book a reading with Katina, which I highly recommend, at her Calendly link. I will also be having her on Enchantable as a special guest to talk with me about astrology for peace and justice movements, so stay tuned for that!
We will share the article when it is available!
I use Resistbot. It is so easy for US citizens to send an email to all our elected officials at once. Text RESIST to 50409 to get started, or visit the website for other options.
This was a prompt from Merlin Sheldrake in his recent interview on For the Wild, which I will definitely be expanding upon in a future post.
This framing comes from the work of Johan Galtung, who recently passed away. With gratitude to his offerings to the field and the world, and may he rest in peace.
Framing from Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects
Thank you, Fran, for this TED talk recommendation! I will additionally recommend Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s book, Walk Out, Walk On.
thanks for sharing my newsletter, Stephanie!
Thanks for your offering Stephanie ♥️