Flashing headlights into The World's dark nights

THE WORLD, XXI Recently I was curious about my earliest understanding around the entity I inadequately describe as the Collective: a vague sense of community beyond just the people I knew personally. The following memory surfaced:

My mom was driving us across the beautiful James river at dusk. My 9- or-10-year-old eyes snapped to an unusual flickering ahead of us. The blinking lights of a car on the other side of the bridge startled me, and I wondered aloud to my mother why people were such crazy drivers. In the swiftly receding light, it seemed a poor time to mess with headlights for any reason. But my mom, a frequent traveler on this bridge, just chuckled and double checked the speedometer. (It was likely completely unnecessary; Mom has always been a reasonable and somewhat cautious driver.)

As we rounded the final bend of the north-bound bridge, she gestured toward the outline of a police car we were approaching that gradually took shape in the darkening evening. "Heh, yes. When there are police hiding, waiting to catch people speeding," she explained, "sometimes other drivers will let you know, by flashing their lights."

I was incredulous as we passed the vehicle and continued making our way home. "You mean, people warn each other about that kind of thing?"

The idea fascinated me, and the great potency of that childhood realization was that sometimes, complete strangers care enough to look out for you with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. What's more, the actions of these strangers can come at very opportune times, and might even save you some trouble.

The discovery evokes something visceral in me to this day. I'm forever grateful to that anonymous, south-bound driver who activated my imagination around the ways small and large that people show up for each other.

It's been a helluva year. Even before the pandemic, so many among us struggled, suffering the effects of unchecked stress, physical and mental ailments, and conflict in our communities, families, selves. The far-reaching effects of COVID-19 have made it feel impossible to escape the most challenging aspects of our lives. If the Collective has taken in anything in the past 12 months, it's that time grinds on, the rhythms of life, death, and change are relentless. Anything can throw us off balance when we least expect it. Through a massive flood of grief and anxiety on individual and collective levels, we've learned a lot about ourselves quickly, and it's left many of us feeling pretty haggard. The World and the systems forced upon her often fail us - systematically.

So. I'm leaning into an invitation to the Collective to find some peace, to intimately know an equilibrium even in our constant state of change. It feels like the work of Accepting What Is, finding small opportunities to shift internally in perhaps the most mundane of ways... but also to tug at myriad veils of misinformation and illusion, so we can begin the work of discerning the unmarked cars and other pitfalls waiting in the dark of our unconscious. Within the heaviness of The World are spaces narrow and wide where support, kindness, and love flow between us, through systems and outside them, and sometimes from unexpected sources. It feels a little strange to start this project with a card that generally represents endings, but thankfully I've gotten hip to the fact that endings and beginnings are two sides of the same coin. With this digital space and the archetypal wisdom of tiny pieces of art, I put my hand on the indicator, ready to flash the headlights; for myself, but also for even one among the Collective who struggles as I do to make out the blurry outlines of whatever awaits on the other side of the bridges we travel.