Have you ever felt your heart tired? Just exhausted with loving and caring in this world that seems to be in a lasting state of existential crises?
The concept “the gift or power of naming” has always intrigued me. My initial encounter with it was in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Then re-encountering the theme ever more magically in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, readings in feminist theology and now, in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The power to name is supposedly empowering. I think it still is. But it’s such a burden too at times. To be able to name things for what they are gives you all the more reason to face them: injustice, betrayal, sacrifice, grief, despair, absence, theft etc. Death. Memento mori. And so, what now? What now when you have an indefinite number of days in life, inherited the wounds of generations past, and possibly unknowingly compromising the future of generations to come? And with all this struggling comes the banality of everyday survival: of having to lose a bit of your fire in order to participate in age-old systems. Because as much we’re against them, there is still dignity in the everyday resistance of just existing. Ignorance is bliss. To name is to contend with reality, not to be content with it. A tired heart is inevitable – and perhaps, necessary. Why does it have to be though that our very tiredness and finiteness be the groundwork for true emancipation? Why does tiredness and finiteness have to be necessary to make the choice to love all the more richer? Why would each of us, as little as we are, need to make such important bets (pagtataya) with implications across borders and generations? In the ongoing struggle, there is both pain and dazzling light. We call it the refiner’s fire
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September 2022
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