Witness Blessing

I wrote a blessing this week as I wrap up my Witness fellowship, honoring the tradition of Elie Wiesel.

It applies to all of us.

What we may be witnesses to ourselves, just as we witness the suffering in the world.

May we also be witnesses to our true emotions, the emotions that come with caring and truly seeing.

May we remember— as this fellowship has taught us — that witnessing itself is an act of love and the true foundation.

May we not force flowers, but honor the real timing of things.

May we not open the box before it is ready. May we find patience and grace in the deepest corners of our own darkness.

May we continue the slow plod in the garden, one step taken after another. May we honor real grief and real heartbreak. May we allow confusion to fill our cavities the way light fills a room.

May we not abandon ourselves. And when we do—— may we return quickly, and without cruelty.

May we stay with ourselves. May we practice awareness toward ourselves the way we have practiced witness toward each other.

May we be witnesses to our own transformation.

May we know that love is ours. That art is ours. That all of the tools and community are ours — and that is not changing.

And may we sit —

quietly,

in the stillness at the center of everything.

What can AI do?

AI can't feel sensations in your body for you.

Not the way fingers accurately detect the feeling of a keyboard as you write this.

There's a sensory awareness in there with no clean name. It's only partially made known to us — in dreams, sometimes. In that moment just before waking when you almost had it.

AI doesn't write in my voice. It can get slightly close. But it doesn't pull in whatever last night was dreamed about. It won't generate the randomness. It can receive randomness, and order — but not the kind that comes from a truly conscious mind, which holds both at once without trying.

At a spiritual or metaphysical level, the great human mystery doesn't come from commands.

It comes from what we don't know but can only vaguely grasp at. Often poorly. Often wrong. It requires a forgetting and a remembering. It requires clouds to burst through until something inside of you breaks open to remember them.

Who knows why.

Messy creating

I've been thinking a lot about AI lately. About what it means that I am a non-optimized human — spending more and more time creating what only I can create. What wants to emerge. What our dreams explain best.

It comes through the act of making — the same making of textiles that has wrapped us since birth. Right now it's my obsession with threads, with ancestry, with family — with joining the circle of women who have created and gossiped and shared stories since humans started doing it at all.

Five thousand years of this. The looping method came before the loom did. Before ceramics did.

Which means more hands, more creation, more lineage, more patience. More human.

And perhaps a better understanding that optimization was never the point. The messy threads are.