HOW WE CAN BE STRONG — The Saltee Academy

This post was originally published as part of the September Saltee Goodness Newsletter. Several people requested an easy way to access and share the article, so here it is!

*Detail of How We Can Be Strong, mixed media assemblage by Sara Saltee.*

That was then

I started making the How We Can Be Strong shrine in 2014, at a time when I was psyching myself up to start putting my Creative Constellations ideas out into the world. (I found the snippet of text that reads “How We Can Be Strong” in a vintage children’s Sunday school primer filled with equally evocative, shrine-worthy headers like “What Love Does” and “What to Think About.”)

I took How We Can Be Strong as an opportunity to envision a definition of strength that I’m guessing wandered pretty far from the singular, certain answers offered by the authors of that original 1930’s text. In this piece, I was exploring a feminine vision of strength as an interplay between perspective and risk, play and growth, beauty and persistence, patience and imagination. I was giving shape to an intuitive understanding that being strong is not about the power to control, but the power to endure and shape, to sense and respond, to align and allow.

I embedded 10 pieces of advice for myself in the shrine, one in each of the bottlecaps that surround the central inner box. They included:

know what you know
love what you love
use your voice
listen well
show up
act
ask for help
inquire within
relax
keep going

*This view shows those bottle caps full of notes to self.*

This is now

Last week, I revisited the “How We Can Be Strong” shrine to spruce it up for display in the gallery, and I came to the piece this time with a whole new set of questions about strength. Now, I’m wondering - as we are ALL wondering - where to find the strength to cope with the shit that is going down these days.

Like all of us, I am tired. I am worn out from the perma-anxiety of life in a pandemic. I’m weary from being angry with the righteously ignorant. I’m exhausted by holding up in a time of ambiguity and bracing myself for an anxiety-ridden fall when “back to school” - usually my favorite time of the year - now means impossible, irresolvable tensions between exposure to a deadly virus, children’s need to learn and grow together, and parents’ ability to make a living. And, of course, there are layers and layers of other concerns and worries - personal, national, international, and global - woven around and through the immediacy of the pandemic’s impact on daily life.

How we can be strong feels like an open question for all of us this fall

One source of bird-view perspective that is giving me strength these days is Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS show Finding Your Roots. Watching as people’s family lines are traced back through the generations reminds me that each of us - each human being alive today - is here because our ancestors survived unthinkably difficult times. If they hadn’t endured through crushing poverty, pogroms, slavery, indentured servitude, war, fire, workhouses, plagues and pandemics, holocausts and dislocations, unbelievable grief and trauma, we would not exist. We are all the progeny of those who endured.

Watching the stories of the ancestors, it seems so clear that what it meant to survive was almost never an ability to control the circumstances in which people found themselves. Survival - as Darwin told us - depended on the capacity to adapt, to risk going somewhere new, to push beyond the borders of what was known or accepted before. They found a way or they made a way. They were creators.

I think that’s what is being asked of us in these historic times. Let’s not waste our energies demanding that the conditions be different but instead focus on enduring the incoherence and ambiguity with grit and grace, when we can, and with as much empathy for each other as we can muster.

Consider relinquishing your despair

The philosopher Alain de Botton reminds us that despair is connected to fantasies of control:

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't – surrender to events with hope.”

Let’s stay out of despair and use our precious energies to surrender, with hope, to events. We don’t know where history is taking us, but this is the ride we’re on now. Being strong, today, for me, means finding a way or making a way to get through each day, remembering to take joy in the immediacy of living, and keeping my focus on creating something new.

Self-soothing is fine and necessary. Find comfort and grant yourself space for respite. But also think about three generations from now, what might be said about you on a future episode of Finding Your Roots when you pop up as a fascinating root on the tree of some future luminary. Make some beauty, speak out for the values that underlie your anger, work for some justice, lend your voice to truth, offer care to someone who needs it.

And most of all, keep going. It helps me to remember that I am, in my daily endurance, my small measure of bravery, kindness, and adaptability, heroically shaping the culture in which my great-great-grandchildren will live. My strength - OUR strength - might not look to us now exactly like that of the Londoners huddling underground to survive the nightly bombings of the Blitz, or the Irish mother fleeing famine, or the American slaves running for freedom, but it is part of the same cloth, a vital strand of the same human story.

Yours in creating,
Sara

“We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt