Art . Culture . Nature . RelationshipsOn April 7, 2020 by admin

I’m the tail end of generation X and have explained that experience to millennials like this:
when I was applying for college, I had to mail away for catalogues and write essays out on paper and mail ‘em in, and wait for paper letters of acceptance. My first week of school, my parents had moved to Haiti and I was in the student lab crying because I needed to get an email address started. By the time I graduated, 4 years later, everyone had to have a cell phone.
Once technology started to develop, it did so more and more rapidly every month. Back then we wrote email letters to each other, long and storied. Now we double-tap to “heart” a picture and roll on.

It was also in college that I was introduced to Octavia Butler. It wasn’t until I read Fledgling a few years ago, and then The Parable of the Sower, though, that I was sure Madam Octavia herself was a Highly Sensitive Person like me. The Vampires in Fledgling, with their extra-sensory senses, their highly empathic abilities; the Sharers in the Parables—how they feel others’ pain truly in their own bodies—my heroine was an HSP, just like so many of us creatives.

Here’s my quick recap of just what “being HSP” is:
our brains and nervous systems are more sensitively wired than about 85% of the population, which makes us almost like human beings with antennae. We have access to more information than others just because our nervous systems are designed to pick up more. We notice everything. And our brains are designed to process it all, pressing the knowledge out, like oil from olives.
It makes us more intuitive, but also more easily overstimulated. We need more breaks, but we are rewarded with a lot of wisdom and insight.

Being HSP, the faster technology developed, the more we became separated from one another physically, the harder it became for me to “know” things I used to know. Especially with people. When I’m on the phone, it’s not so bad: the voice, the breath, the intonations, I can sometimes pick up more about a person’s state of heart and mind because my eyes can’t distract me. I hear deeper. But via email or even FaceTime, I’m deprived of the physical knowing that my intuition gives me when I’m in someone’s physical presence. Whether we are aware of it or not, I think that’s true for all of us—to one extent or another.

In each other’s space, we don’t just notice the smallest flinching beat of an eyelid or the flutter of a lip, we feel each other. There are actual vibrations with actual warmth, coolness, softness, avoidance, excitement, even color, and many other nuanced, more subtle feelings that come through. Being HSP on a group conference call or a Zoom meeting, I feel like someone has taken my eyes and ears. There are no vibrations and the voice is clouded and broken. I feel handicapped. The messages and signals I receive in life that tell me deeper stories about what is happening in someone else and between us are gone. And I don’t know what to do without them. One of the most powerful ways I understand the person I’m communicating with is taken away. I lose the ability to connect as deeply as I both am used to, and need to connect.

The Rona is terrifying. This virus is killing people, folks are losing family and friends we had no idea were vulnerable until just a few months ago. 1.3 million people across the world are infected—that we know of; over 6 million have applied for unemployment in the States. Detroit is shutting off folks’ water for nonpayment of their bill. Now that the virus has been identified on Reservations and among Brazil’s Indigenas, I’m particularly worried. We’re not well-enough prepared in New York City, and the thought of losing another people, another Indigenous vulnerable people is devastating to me. This pandemic is making it incredibly clear (because for some folks it wasn’t clear enough before this) that the Western hegemonic, capitalist, colonialist, slave-making culture pervasive the world over is anti-human and anti-life.

What I hope, and what millions of people prayed this weekend, is that we will begin to change. We will begin to recognize not only one another’s humanity, but the common experience of being alive and conscious in and with and as part of this world. I wrote not long ago about Animals in Street Art in 2019. They were everywhere in paint because the more of them we lost in life, the more we began to recognize how much we need them. Brazil burned. Australia burned. Africa and India burned. Now, we can’t breathe. Just like Eric Garner couldn’t breathe. Is a virus that’s cold and wet here to soothe the scorched Earth we left in our wake?

One hope I make tonight, one intention I set, is that through this horror–this death–we all become more aware of one another—of all living things. In the very ways I suggest that our intuition is always sensing the seemingly smallest vibrations of another person in our actual space: the way we know our pets’ moods, the way we mothers can feel the reasons our infants are crying, the way we know when we are about to be kissed before either of us has moved a millimeter—we call our own attention to sensing those near us. We call our attention to what our intuition knows.

We need technology now (perhaps more than we could have imagined), but we also need to recognize where it falls short of humanity’s, and life’s, most vital needs for the connection and empathy that Octavia’s heroines show us. I hope that all of us will become more aware of the hum of life in our own bodies and in the bodies and spirits of the living around us. Our intuition helps us do this. All we have to do is take a breath, exhale and feel those vibrations.

I want us to come out of quarantine more sensitive to the heartbeat of life, and more committed to coming together in the body. With each other and with all life. I want us to recognize life and honor it. It begins with intuiting that smallest vibration.

Mitakuye Oyasin,
Mariah