Photo by Tim Mossholder

It’s an unmistakable anniversary this week, that marks the start of a year of collective suffering, incredible loss and mass awakening. This time last year we, like many small businesses, sent all our people home and laid off many. At first, we thought this was just for two weeks, but then quickly reality sank in that this was magical thinking. The twelve months to come would serve as a test of endurance: What resources would last? Which individuals and relationships would stand the isolation? How resilient and varied would our coping be? 

To be honest, as a small business owner, this time last year and the weeks to follow included its fair share of grasping and gripping and digging in to try to maintain life as it was. Perhaps I am not alone in that. The illusion then was that what we had was working and it was to be maintained. 

2020 is now being labeled as “The Lost Year,” “The Great Pause,” “The Awakening,” or one that resonates with me the most, “A Year of Reckoning.” It’s been a time of assessment, evaluation, and seeing that which is amiss. 

I would not have wished this year upon us with so many lives lost and so much burden on our communities. Though, it seems many of us woke up this year and were backed into growing edges that we were able to avoid prior. It’s unmistakable now that much was broken in the ‘before-times,’ but some of us were moving too fast to see it, or too busy gripping status quo. I woke up this year to my own blurred vision – overcommitted, over-caffeinated and in overdrive, with kids at home who missed me in my absence, and a mortal body wanting real food and time outside. I woke up to blindspots of privilege and whiteness, and the danger of that blindness.

A few days after we shuttered, I shared in an essay, Perhaps If We Get This Right, We’ll Never Go Back to Normal, that there have been so many moments in these past few years, when I listened to someone’s pulse in the treatment room and thought to myself, “…we weren’t built for this.” This, meaning: this pace, this financial structure, this social structure. 

In the stillness I, we, could finally hear what our bodies have been saying for a while: something is not right.

I shared then that, “…the ‘laws of nature’ have always informed how we [those of us trained in Chinese Medicine] think. Mother nature is fully in charge now. No quieting her any longer. This is a moment to reframe everything, to be curious about what was and what will be as a community, and for each of us as individuals. Perhaps, if we get this right, we’ll never go back to normal.”

One of my mentors in my acupuncture training, Bob Duggan, used to ask his students, “If you are going to practice this medicine that has come long before you, can you ensure that you can commit that everything you do honors the 7 generations before you and the 7 generations to come?” While this seed was planted in me fourteen years ago, I may not have truly heard the inquiry until this year, the soil now rich for transformation and change for us all. Is this way of life in service to the 7 generations? 

In this year of reflection, author adrienne maree brown came onto my radar and has become another powerful teacher to me on this theme of using natural law as a guide.

In her work, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds, brown invites us to consider instead of individualism, interdependence, and collaboration, to embrace change, possibility and adaptation, to let go of the status quo, and to practice and experiment (with intention). Throughout the book she cites natural examples of collaboration, including how birds travel in flocks, how ants build together and how fungi develop incredible growths throughout the earth. She offers:

we are living in impossible times….we are living in times created by our own species…look further ahead, like our ancestors did, look further. extend, hold on, pull, evolve. [we must] grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

It seems as clear as day now, on this tragic yet perhaps essential anniversary of awakening that if we are truly to honor those we lost this year, and to try to right all that we have wronged in the before times, that any and all of us in a position of change (small or fractal as it may seem) are called now to aligning ourselves around what we long for and what we believe in (be it play and learning, purposeful work, meaningful connection, community, sustainable living, and so on). 

That includes a small business like us imagining a new model for business and capitalism – where capital, resources and knowledge are shared and grown together in service of those in our communities. This organization was born to honor and project the wisdom of traditional medicine handed down to us, with a personal commitment and intention to carry on the work of the generations before me, my own parents and grandparents who practiced good healthcare one patient at a time. 

Roots grow in winter. The branches of trees grow in the spring. And fungi are proof that there is life after death.

After this long winter, and in our anniversary of the start of our shuttering and our awakening, this is where we stand as an organization/organism of individuals – grateful for survival, wide awake, with clear intent, and in service of our communities, the generations before us and those to come.  

Thanks to you, in our community. 

Sarah, et al.