Beautiful Ruins

H. Raab via Compfight

If you want to read something today that is beautiful and challenging and unsettling, read this.

D. L. Mayfield moved a couple of years ago with her husband and daughter from Portland to a diverse immigrant community in Minneapolis. They live a life of solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. If you’re curious how they ended up living this life, the post above in A Deeper Story will give you a pretty good feel for it. 

Here’s a snippet of that piece:

Relocate everything, redistribute your life. Move away from safety and security. Go the opposite direction as the American Dream, and see if you don’t breath a sigh of freedom as you go. Move in and sit down and don’t get up for a good long while. Listen for as long as you can stand it, and when you burst at the seams with all you are learning and all you want to share, listen harder. Be confused, be scared, be naive, be hopeful. Start out lonely, and float into the land of the overwhelmed. It is your turn to feel like the stranger, and soon it will be your turn to experience the hospitality.

If something feels easy, it is because it is. If something feels hard, it is because it is. If going and doing a project or a trip or a social media campaign is quick and fast and requires little of you except for the requisite epiphanies, then it is too easy. It does not speak to the lions waiting to devour us all, it does not bind us to living breathing people. Go, go and see the world, but come back as a sister or brother, a friend and equal. We are all part prophet, all part narcissist. We are all trying to save the world through scarves, a little bit of hope and beauty that we can take with us into this lonely world.