"You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose." ---Bob Dylan
I read this quote early in the week and have carried it forward daily, considering how I feel about it. What do you think about it?
I understand it. I know what he is saying, but words need to be added to these sentences. Words that point to courage and transformation.
To engage with vulnerability consciously, one is engaging with life courageously rooted in connection and belonging.
Bob's second sentence,"...being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose" may be accurate, but that does not entail that one will be sensitive to life in that state. In fact, if one does not feel empowered by loss, which comes from healing and transformative self-work, one will feel disempowered. That same sentiment of having nothing more to lose in a disempowered state leads to despair, apathy, and violence.
My life has been a journey towards opening myself to life (like you too). This is to say, I have been learning how to advance with the courage to expose my heart, to speak my truth, to love what I love, and to do this, trusting in an innate worth that is not connected to what I have through a capitalist lens.
Much of my formative years were an education in scarcity, insecurity, instability, and fear. As a young person born into circumstances as such, I worked day and night as a savant strategist to hide these vulnerabilities from the cruelty of children and the pecking order. I plotted for a future escape and maneuvered academically with determination to leave behind the family and place I was born into.
This worked for me. In the ways it works. This is to say that you build fortresses around yourself that no one can cross, and at a certain point, even you can't remember where the room is that holds your heart.
At seventeen, I graduated high school early and moved from my small town in Massachusetts to Colorado for an interim period before college. I met up with a friend, another early high school graduate, we shared a studio apartment, waitressed, ate restaurant leftovers for free, and snowboarded. I planned to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) or Cooper Union if accepted. These were the only two colleges I was considering attending.
I was accepted to RISD, not Cooper. I was accepted but without any financial aid. My mother had not filled out the paperwork for financial assistance. My father was missing. I could only attend with a scholarship and financial aid as a fully self-supporting seventeen-year-old with parents on government aid. When I called to find out if there was anything that could be done to remedy the mistake, the answer was I could defer and apply for the following year.
At that moment, I felt defeated. I felt an insurmountable powerlessness of systems and circumstances. As Bob said, I felt I had nothing more to lose because I had lost hope and surrendered to what I believed was the truth–I was worthless. That incident of loss compounded the years before and spurred my blackout years to come. Which were dangerous, careless times. I believed I had nothing to lose, that I was worthless, except for my body which men seemed to admire…
(this is all a much longer story).
Skipping ahead.
I began facilitating my Creativity + Courage workshops over a decade ago as healing work for others (and myself). I worked weekly with adults of all ages in recovery from addictions and co-occurring diseases. Yes, these folks were working to recover their bodies ability to regulate without drugs and alcohol, but together, we were recovering a sense of self-worth, of hope in a life where we belonged, had purpose, and didn't need to hide in shame.
We were recovering our courage to be vulnerable, to carry our hearts forward rather than bury them in fortresses. Bob speaks of this type of vulnerability when he speaks of being sensitive to life. I think the challenges are the words missing from his statement–one must go through the hell gates of loss and then surmount the fear of loss–living in a courageous way that bears an open heart to both the crickets in the fields and the sorrows of the soldiers. This isn't easy. Capitalism, patriarchy, and all the 'isms make it more challenging. God-goodness-nature makes it more accessible.
I want to write more.
Maybe it is simple. Maybe it’s as simple as realizing we don’t own anything and we don’t owe anything. We are only guests here for a short while. How do we live as an expression of gratitude and celebration for the hospitality given to us by earth and sky? What if that was our collective organizing principle?
Exercise: Using watercolors paint ‘Gratitude’ without any recognizable symbols.
Do: Write what you see when you are finished the painting. Describe the painting in words.
Dare: Each morning start your day with a gratitude list before you reach for any other information.
Tell me how it went!